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Canonical Helps Launch A Snap Store For The Orange Pi Community (ubuntu.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the oh-snap dept.

"Developers can distribute their applications packaged as snaps to Orange Pi owners," explains a new blog post from Canonical, bragging that "hackers and tinkerers can install complex IoT and server projects in seconds." An anonymous reader quotes Ubuntu's Insights blog: Orange Pi maker Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co. Ltd is launching an app store in partnership with Canonical to foster an active community of developers and users. Through this app store, developers gain a simple mechanism to share their applications, projects and scripts between themselves and with the wider Orange Pi community...

With snaps developers can distribute their application in a secure, confined package bundled with all its dependencies, so users can install applications that could take half an hour to install in just a few seconds. The Orange Pi App Store uses the whitelabel app store offering from Canonical, which lets them distribute applications to the Orange Pi community under its own brand. The store is a place for developers to share their Orange Pi specific applications. It also benefits from the wealth of applications available in the Ubuntu snap store, also available through the store.
Are there any Slashdot readers who are actually using snaps? Or -- for that matter -- are there any Slashdot readers developing with the Orange Pi?

4 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, let's build a walled garden by hughbar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To declare interest, I'm a big Raspberry Pi fan and user.

    However, I see this as another attempt to build a walled garden (small wall, admittedly) by creating 'snaps'. I'm not sure how these will differ from Debian packages, for example and Debian packaging is arguably more 'universal'. I currently use Ubuntu Mate on Pi3 and it's pretty good. But, unhappily, I'm now going to start watching Canonical for signs that it wishes to be the Microsoft of Linux.

    For complex, autonomous applications (as opposed to apps, whatever they are, only joking before someone tells me) easier just to supply a complete image, anyway, like some of the media centre offerings.

    --
    On y va, qui mal y pense!
    1. Re:Yes, let's build a walled garden by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "copy files from the download folder into some other folder so you can run them."

      No. You really don't.

      Having said that debian seems to have lost control over what constitutes a suggest, recommend and depend (on purpose) so it's packaging system becomes pretty useless without repackaging. (thanks for that guys)

    2. Re:Yes, let's build a walled garden by Goaway · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Some of us get to have that every single day on our OS, and the sky has not fallen on us yet. In fact, it works great.

      So yes. Yes, we do really, really want that. We have tried it, it works, it's much nicer, and we want it.

    3. Re:Yes, let's build a walled garden by _merlin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, so instead of patching your system-wide copy of OpenSSL for the next heartbleed, you get to patch the copy embedded in every snap. Isn't that fantastic?