Slack Now Available As a Snap For Linux (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli writes: Today, yet another wildly popular program gets the Snap treatment, and quite frankly, it is arguably more significant than Spotify. What is it? Slack! Yes, Canonical announces that the ubiquitous communication app can be installed as a Snap. True, Slack was already available on the Linux desktop, but this makes installing it and keeping it updated much easier. "In adopting the universal Linux app packaging format, Slack will open its digital workplace up to an-ever growing community of Linux users, including those using Linux Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Solus, and Ubuntu. Designed to connect us to the people and tools we work with every day, the Slack snap will help Linux users be more efficient and streamlined in their work. And an intuitive user experience remains central to the snaps' appeal, with automatic updates and rollback features giving developers greater control in the delivery of each offering," says Canonical.

Comments

Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[OffTheLip]

The summary is a feast of catchy names. All without explanation.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[ls671]

oh come on! Everybody knows Slack == Slackware Linux
http://slackware.com/

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[TheRaven64]

Slack is a bloated monstrosity that provides IRC and a few other things, using a combination of Node.js and Chromium to produce one of the largest and most memory-hungry desktop applications that you might ever need to run. Snap is Ubuntu's version of the old PC-BSD PBI installer, where each application comes with all of its dependencies and installs them in a directory so that the package maintainers don't have to worry about incompatible upgrades. The combination of the two allows Slack to consume even more resources, by not even sharing memory mappings for common libraries.

The goal of Slack is to minimise productivity, by consuming all available computing resources and all available attention. This combination allows it to consume even more resources, but unfortunately does nothing to increase the amount of time that people waste on Slack.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[DontBeAMoran]

but unfortunately does nothing to increase the amount of time that people waste on Slack.

Hence the expression, stop slacking off!

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimer has already made a statement about that.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

A Twitter pre-announcement for the video you're dropping tomorrow that no one wants. Amazing.

"A lot of times," according to Steve Jobs, "people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm convinced this is all a dream. No way someone can be as dense as Creimer.

You know what they say..any publicity is good publicity. Maybe that's the theory he subscribes to.

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot makes up 30% of the external traffic to his YouTube channel every day. No wonder he posts a daily comment or two despite being at -1. The creimertards provide so much free publicity.

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes, soon creimer will have views in the low two digits.

Creimer's top five videos by view count:

• Batman, Robin and Riddler Play "Johnny Be Goode" (5,653 views)
• William Shatner Stole Leonard Nimoy's Bicycle (581 views)
• Godzilla (Cosplayer) Dances to Blue Oyster Cult (440 views)
• Black Friday 2017 @ Apple Park Visitor Center (286 views)
• Ming Na Wen @ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Panel (104 views)

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimer is a very dense fellow for being 360 pounds while taking up very little space.

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Now creimer has to repeat this success 199 more times. creimer is spending a lot of time on what creimer calls a shithole instead.

Is creimer sure that creimer has creimer's priorities straight?

creimer was also supposed to publish a book of haiku written by creimer. creimer has delayed this publication several times already, does creimer realize he could be building his business with that book as well?

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimer you lamer. Building kernel modules in slackware is the same as building kernel modules in any distribution.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve jobs took observations about the world around him and turned them into good design. Applied it to shit that nerds have always known would eventually be a mainstream thing (tablets, PDAs, digital music players, smart watches), and then makes an earnest effort to refine as many small details as possible before release. Slashdotters are not the "people" jobs was talking about.

His rounded corner fixation : Rounded corners were a sign of quality, shitty products often have square corners.
But most of his design inspiration came from stereo equipment. Televisions and music devices were once the most computer-esque appliance that a person might have in their home. He simply took design cues from devices he liked. The flat black magnesium of the NeXT was stolen from the flat black arm of his record player. The ipod and many other devices were inspired by braun electronic devices.

You on the other hand pay very little attention to the world around you and take inspiration from any self declared expert, almost exclusively from successful self declared experts who sell expertise actually. To sell to creimer you just fake it until you make it and then sell tubby your book.

The one way that you ARE much like Steve Jobs is that once you have a stupid fucking idea stuck in your head nothing will ever change your mind. It took fucking pancreatic cancer to enable right click by default in OSX.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware had terrible hardware support out of the box. SuSE was much better in that regards.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

" SuSE was much better in that regards."

creimer not grammaring too good tonight. creimer should focus on creimer's friday morning video.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what does snap? The ground under your feet!

HAHA!

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

try slackware 14.2 you creimertard!

creimer lying again!

poor bastard!

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

(circa late 1990's)

That doesn't make any sense you pathological lying fucktard!

Learn to write:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

creimer is a circus clown. That's why he uses the word "circa" everywhere. He thinks other circus clowns will mod him up if he does. He also thinks that it makes him look very sophisticated.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you take a quote from a famous gazillionaire and think it applies equally well to a barely-viewed Youtube channel.

Your newest video has 8 views, and Youtube has changed their rules so small-time subscribers don't even make the pennies you were hoping for. It's not going to work, try something else.

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

But you have basically no traffic on your channel. I'm actually surprised it's only 30%, because why would anybody check out your channel unless it's to laugh at you? Are people Googling "fountain video"?

Re: Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that really is not a lot of views. Why does he even bother?

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimertards are screeching like a bunch of old women.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[TheRaven64]

Currently 80% informative, 20% interesting. I was going for funny, but maybe I was closer to the mark than I thought...

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that work on Socket 7 motherboards? Slackware 3.2 did not out of the box.

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the alternative to this bloated monstrosity? Assuming one was interested in this Functionality?

Re:Title sounds like a breakfast cereal

[lsatenstein]

Slack is a bloated monstrosity that provides IRC and a few other things, using a combination of Node.js and Chromium to produce one of the largest and most memory-hungry desktop applications that you might ever need to run. Snap is Ubuntu's version of the old PC-BSD PBI installer, where each application comes with all of its dependencies and installs them in a directory so that the package maintainers don't have to worry about incompatible upgrades. The combination of the two allows Slack to consume even more resources, by not even sharing memory mappings for common libraries.

The goal of Slack is to minimise productivity, by consuming all available computing resources and all available attention. This combination allows it to consume even more resources, but unfortunately does nothing to increase the amount of time that people waste on Slack.

Wow, so now I have software that I can download and justify my purchase of a pair of 6 terrabyte drives. I just love to be able to run any software that actually brings along it's dynamic link libraries.

Only 147 MB

[tonique]

Only 147 MB for a glorified IRC client! Get yours now!

Re:Only 147 MB

[thegreatbob]

I looked into these at some point, Electron applications come packaged with an unholy shitload of not-likely-used javascript and whatnot from node.js, leading to a base executable size of something around 80MB.

Re:Only 147 MB

[0100010001010011]

But... Emojis.

Aside from some bug fixes and new useless features we've been reinventing IRC and Usenet since them.

Re:Only 147 MB

[bluelip]

When did configure ; make ; make install become too difficult?

Re: Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not too difficult, it just takes too long.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Gravis Zero]

When did configure ; make ; make install become too difficult?

the first 3 times it failed during configure.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

> When did configure ; make ; make install become too difficult?

1984, introduction of the Macintosh.

You know, the year non-programmers started using computers?

Re:Only 147 MB

[citylivin]

147mb? thats nothing. On windows, the cache files for slack can run well into the gigabytes after only a year.

have a multi user machine with a small ssd and several users, now you are consuming tens of gigs... not cool!

Re:Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

They must have unrolled the delay loops, which are spread into every other code line of Slack. The slowness of the Slack can not be explained otherwise, nobody can write so slow IRC client unless he specifically adds delays into code.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Kjella]

Only 147 MB for a glorified IRC client! Get yours now!

So what kind of peanuts do you work for if that's an issue? I don't recall how many GB the work computer uses but it has Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server so it's at least 50 GB+. And if it was 50.2 GB... nobody would give a shit. The computer could have IRC, ICQ, AIM, Skype, Discord, Lync, Slack, Jabber and a dozen more "collaboration" apps running just fine. But I'd like just one that works really well, the resources it takes are negligible. As long as the bloat doesn't translate to being slow...

Re: Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

It would still be faster than starting the Slack itself.

Re: Only 147 MB

[loufoque]

Standard PCs cannot have more than 32GB of RAM.

Re:Only 147 MB

[RightwingNutjob]

Bloat always translates into being slow. I don't care how many gajigabytes of SSD storage you have on your system, all the page fault delays when mapping and unmapping them all into memory take time away from the app and everything else on the system. Sloppy coding practices like that tend to pile up (imagine that, laziness is contagious) and make for unusable messes.

MS Word or Powerpoint on a new machine takes many tens of seconds to load and render some pages whereas the version of that software from about 10 years back has most of the same functionality but screams on even low-end hardware you can buy today. Why? Laziness. Laziness that wastes my time when I'm trying to work.

It's also not a good idea to assume that the PC your crapware is being run on is the same 4k top-of-the-line workstation you're testing it on. I don't know if you've heard, but mobile device are all the rage these days. The thing that distinguishes mobile from laptop from workstation is power consumption. On a desktop workstation, you can throw around gigabytes and gigahertz like you don't care. On mobile devices you count milliwatts.

Re:Only 147 MB

[slack_justyb]

Everyone seems to forget the reason why Slack is what it is... There is no self-hosting for Slack. Everything you do in Slack is in the cloud and the reason companies do it is so they don't have to hire someone to maintain an IRC server in their company.

But yeah, Slack is just a bloated, slow, insecure, unoriginal, pile of horse dung IRC client. We all have to remember that the new hotness in IT is not having an IT department.

Re: Only 147 MB

[Merk42]

Do you not know the difference between disk space and RAM?

Re:Only 147 MB

[Merk42]

Bloat always translates into being slow

Large install size != bloat != slow

MS Word or Powerpoint on a new machine takes many tens of seconds to load and render some pages whereas the version of that software from about 10 years back has most of the same functionality but screams on even low-end hardware you can buy today. Why? Laziness. Laziness that wastes my time when I'm trying to work.

Of course, it coudln't be anything else like increased demand of other functionality from both the program and the OS, having to deal with more and more use cases than the one a decade ago, or any number of other reasons.

It's also not a good idea to assume that the PC your crapware is being run on is the same 4k top-of-the-line workstation you're testing it on. I don't know if you've heard, but mobile device are all the rage these days. The thing that distinguishes mobile from laptop from workstation is power consumption. On a desktop workstation, you can throw around gigabytes and gigahertz like you don't care. On mobile devices you count milliwatts.

Good thing there is a separate app for those mobile devices.

Re:Only 147 MB

[DontBeAMoran]

I was using computers before 1984 and I've never had to do "configure, make, make install" before.

Re:Only 147 MB

[OrangeTide]

We could all sign onto FreeNode. If companies want to donate money to FN instead of paying Slack, then they are free to do so, and really at whatever amount they are comfortable paying.

If you had a company of 1000 employees, I believe you're looking at paying Slack about $8k/month. This is right around the break even point for hiring someone to maintain an IRC server full time. You probably get a better deal with Slack because they would include hardware and services and 24 hour support.

If you were a larger company of say 10,000 people like mine, then staffing up your IT department for running your own corporate services like IRC, XMPP, whatever becomes a better deal than Slack. Especially because of the encryption and retention policies of Slack. (yet my company uses Slack as our primary app)

disclaimer - I am not a representative of FreeNode, PDPC or OPN.

Re:Only 147 MB

[0100010001010011]

There is no self-hosting for Slack.

Aside from learning, when was the last time you setup an IRC server?

Re: Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a disk?

Re:Only 147 MB

[0100010001010011]

about $8k/month

I never bothered to look into pricing but.... there aren't even words.

WTF. Most of the discussion I see on ircd requirements mention computers in the hundreds of MHz.

Re: Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

What functionality? Enquiring minds want to know. I feel like chat hasn't changed in 15-20 years. Same features.

Re:Only 147 MB

[RightwingNutjob]

Bloat always translates into being slow

You don't know how computer operating systems work, do you? Re-read my comment and these articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Only 147 MB

[Merk42]

Those articles don't have "bloat" mentioned anywhere in them.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Chris Mattern]

The cost of the computer is meaningless, because it's only a small fraction of what you're paying. The real cost is the cost of hiring someone capable of administrating it.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Dog-Cow]

Does IRC support code formatting, snippets, utf8, images, and random attachments? To name a few things I use all the time with Slack.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Dog-Cow]

IRC does one tiny part of what Slack does. It's not a replacement any more than a U-Haul is a replacement for a cargo train.

Re:Only 147 MB

[OrangeTide]

yup, for $2k - $10k in equipment you can handle multiple sites for an entire corporation. You'll be able to use at least half of this equipment for 2 years, and the other half of it for 5 years (like any switches or routers). We're talking about a rather low NRE (non-reoccurring expense) for the hardware.

Full time sysadmin, let's say you pay her $75k/yr. With management overhead, facilities overheads and employee benefits a company probably works this out as a cool $100k/yr cost. (taking a wild guess there). Starts to be equivalent to paying Slack $8k/month ($96k/year). Although I'd rather have in-house services that can be customized to our processes and needs, than be at the whim of an external organization.

Re: Only 147 MB

[Chris Mattern]

What's a disk?

A device of persistant solid state memory, Why it is called a "disk" is a mystery lost to the depths of time, as it is not at all disk-shaped.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems one moderator don't know his history. Nobody who owned a Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Color Computer 2, Color Computer 3, TI-99 or ZX80 has ever done "configure, make, make install". Linux/Unix isn't the only thing that has ever existed.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

I not so long ago accidentally destroyed a production IRC server VM, so recently!

Note to self: When doing ^R in bash, read the entire command before hitting return.

Re:Only 147 MB

[RightwingNutjob]

Do I need to spell it out for you? If the executable image is bigger, more of it needs to be mapped in to memory. If more of it needs to be mapped into a (finite) amount of memory, the system will end up swapping more memory out to disk, making it slow.

If the executable also comes with its own libraries instead of using installed system libraries (the whole idea behind snaps and docker and whatever), then all of those will also need to be mapped in to memory instead of reusing the ones already mapped in for other processes.

If the application's designers pepper blocking disk accesses or writes to a network socket in every other line of code, then the application will run slower and the CPU will need to execute more context switches for the same functionality.

Bloat, therefore: slow. QED

Re: Only 147 MB

[loufoque]

How is hdd space relevant to your ability of running applications?

Re:Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're looking for Microsoft's IRC client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Re:Only 147 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but being a computer user before 1984 the expectations were different for you.

It's more about hordes of mouth-breathers, grabbing mice and poking at icons, overwhelming the nerds who had the patience to read man pages and memorize shell syntax.

Re: Only 147 MB

[Merk42]

This whole comment chain, "Only 147 MB", refers to the disk size, not its RAM, that's all.

Re:Only 147 MB

[Merk42]

How is the first scenario "bloat" though? Maybe it just needs to be whatever size it is given its feature-set etc.

Re: Only 147 MB

[loufoque]

The original message in the chain was generic and complained of the general memory footprint.

Bullshit Bingo?

[houghi]

This is written as if it was specifically to see who wins Busllshit Bingo. I just need one more buzzword and I win.

Re:Bullshit Bingo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just invoke Docker, and how this is meant to make it easy for containers to run Slack.

Re:Bullshit Bingo?

[RightwingNutjob]

Bitcoin!

Snap?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a Snap, a new Docker competitor or something?

Re:Snap?

[mattventura]

Basically, someone decided there were too many Linux packaging formats, so they decided to make yet another.

Re:Snap?

[0100010001010011]

It's the Linux equivalent of a OS X .app.

Re:Snap?

[ArchieBunker]

So another container format? I thought everyone loved Linux and how you could compile everything dynamically and end "dll hell". Looks like they ran into the same problems since containers are all the rage these days.

Re:Snap?

[TheCycoONE]

Not to be confused with Flatpak ...

Re:Snap?

[radicimo]

Yes, but didn't you read. This one is the *universal* Linux app packaging format.

Re:Snap?

[apoc.famine]

Since no one else has.....

Re:Snap?

[TemporalBeing]

What is a Snap, a new Docker competitor or something?

Snap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(package_manager)) is one of several "universal" formats. It requires a specialized daemon (snapd) to run the Snap Apps. It kind of won out because Ubuntu created it (Ubuntu's famous NIH syndrome) and pushed it out in Ubuntu 16.04 IIRC thus giving it a larger market than any of the other solutions. The other big one was Flatpak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak) which is very similar. Both deliver apps very much like Mac OS X does - all bound together in a big tarball.

Older efforts like Autopackage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopackage) are actually better in many respects as they don't bundle the whole thing; instead it creates a binary that requires linking to the local system during install - truly universal; unfortunately it never really caught on. Autopackage was the biggest of any of these kinds of solutions until Flatpak and Snap were created and started duking it out.

Re:Snap?

[cas2000]

that's inconvenient for those who want to sell proprietary shitware, or distribute proprietary spying shitware for free.

Not confusing at all... nosiree.

[mark-t]

Slackware, which has been a Linux distro for only a handful of months less time than there have been Linux distributions at all, is often informally referred to as Slack as well.

Re:Not confusing at all... nosiree.

[Mr. Slippery]

Yes, for technical people "Slack" means "Slackware", not yet another chat client for people too twitchy to use e-mail.

Re:Not confusing at all... nosiree.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yes, for technical people "Slack" means "Slackware", not yet another chat client for people too twitchy to use XMPP/conferences.

Fixed that for you :)

Re:Not confusing at all... nosiree.

[Dog-Cow]

Only if you mean "Linux nerds" when you write "technical people". Or ignoramuses.

So I keep hearing about Slack

[93 Escort Wagon]

I work with a few people who swear Slack boosts their productivity significantly. But whenever I'm in their office and they look away due to a Slack message, it's never a work thing - it's their husband or some friend telling them something non-work-related.

Looking back a few years, I noticed my own productivity went up significantly after I started ignoring my then-boss's directive to stay keep a group chat window open all the time.

Does anyone here have actual evidence - even a specific anecdote - that using Slack or another chat program helps them work better? Excepting those of you whose job it is to do online tech support, of course...

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[davecb]

Alas, I usually see the opposite: it's like being in a room full of people, all exclaiming "Ooh! Shiney!" all day.

Only once was a chat useful: a small group of us communicated with team members at a particular customer while trying to debug a problem. And it was a free and trivial chat program, just a reflector for telnet.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[0100010001010011]

Does anyone here have actual evidence - even a specific anecdote - that using Slack or another chat program helps them work better?

FOSS projects like FreeBSD seem to get developed through mailing lists and IRC.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

Slack boosts their productivity significantly.

That's hilarious. Slack is old IRC slang for excessively hanging out on IRC instead of getting work done. I assume the name is a reference to that.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Gilgaron]

We have a O365 Slack clone at work called Teams I'm going to try to promote to get rid of the inevitable super long email chains editing a Word document as a group... for chat mostly everyone here uses Skype, which does work well when people are at different locations, which can include being away from their desk and in a spot they can't bring a mobile phone. If people were always at their personal desk then it'd be better to just walk over, most of the time.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[gosand]

Does anyone here have actual evidence - even a specific anecdote - that using Slack or another chat program helps them work better?

I have two positive experiences with other chat programs.

1. I worked at a startup back in 2005, and while we were all in the same office, we had our own IRC. It was the go-to place for the development team. We had to also deploy to production once a week in the evening. That is how we all communicated during those activities.

2. In 2009 I was at a very large bank, and we were just starting up agile development there. The team was dispersed in different cities, and we had an offshore team as well. We used MindAlign (which Microsoft later purchased and rebranded as Group Chat) because it offered the persistent chat room which was very valuable. You could send alerts to everyone in the room (SERVER IS GOING DOWN!) and it would launch a popup. Or you could configure alerts for specific keywords, e.g. if someone typed the word "bug" then it would alert me. Your username was also an alert word, so you could get someone's attention by typing their name. You could spawn off side-rooms, and set up various other rooms. Nothing new by today's standards, but very very useful then. Offshore could catch up on the day's goings-on by perusing the room.

Of course, these things are only good if everyone uses them. It started to become less and less effective after a couple of years when some people refused to use it. But if you have everyone on it, and you can keep the conversations on-topic, then I found them to be very useful for dispersed teams.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

Real developers, who've been idling on IRC for 30 years, know how useful an informal communications channel can be.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[DontBeAMoran]

Yeah, sure, IRC slang...

I'll just leave that here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is all about hipster irony these days...

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

So effectively IRC with a bot maintaining the chatroom?

Or would presistent mean that once you logged on, it would pull down all the traffic there since your last login (aka what a bouncer or similar will do on irc)?

I'm sure i everyone was not busy reinventing IRC we could get a server extended to offer persistence out of the box rather than via third party tools.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the IRC slang is tongue-in-cheek
see also

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

For day to day work its alright, just like any other chat client. We also use it to post if we are going to be working at home or elsewhere so there's one central place each day you can check if someone is in the office or not. The bot integration is what separates slack with quick bot creation (though I never wrote an irc bot so Im not sure how it would compare). I.e. we have op5 IT notices integrated in to a channel so we get all sorts of info if servers start acting erratically. We have another for core dumps out of backtrace that give a quick snap of the stackdump and the machine it was on with a link to the full bt output.

All sorts of things like that are what makes slack useful, not the irc-cloneness. I.e. being on the dev side I have mine set to notify me of the core dump channel since thats what I really care about. The devops team usually have notices for the op5 and IT channels. If you use it right it can focus down information flow in to things you care about. But like anything else it can be a huge distraction. I have seen plenty of people with slack servers open that are just for them and their friends and the majority of their time is spent paying attention to those

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[fincher69]

At my previous employer, we used HipChat. I'd say it was helpful mostly because we had a pretty new team with lots of questions. Since most weren't pressing, they could just ping the whole group on chat. Progressively, the newer folks could field more and more of the questions. Only when they didn't have an answer did more senior people jump in and help. I found that much more preferable than having people stopping by my cube all the time to ask questions.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[gosand]

persistent chat.
So if I logged in today, and the chat had been going on for a week, I could scroll/search that entire conversation.
I forgot another feature, which again wasn't anything new, but you could have banner messages .. e.g. "current build installed in QA is 1.2.3.4"

Just handy stuff. It also integrated with your network users, which helped administrators I am sure. Microsoft didn't mess it up too badly after they bought it. :)

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Dog-Cow]

I use Slack all the time. I was using it a short while ago, to communicate with a coworker who is also at home (it's 11:00 PM as I write this). It's also quite useful in the office, as an open floor plan precludes constant conversation.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Dog-Cow]

Slack is a tool for people who want to get work done with other people. IRC is where you go to slack off. The difference may be hard to discern for people who prefer ignorance, but Slack does a shitload more than IRC, and it doesn't require a nerd education to use effectively.

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[TeknoHog]

Does anyone here have actual evidence - even a specific anecdote - that using Slack or another chat program helps them work better?

I only have some analogies: using chat programs for work is

• (a) the online version of open plan office spaces
• (b) like trying to get work done during meetings

Re:So I keep hearing about Slack

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with a few people who swear Slack boosts their productivity significantly. But whenever I'm in their office and they look away due to a Slack message, it's never a work thing - it's their husband or some friend telling them something non-work-related.

Does anyone here have actual evidence - even a specific anecdote - that using Slack or another chat program helps them work better?

Anyone acquainted with the book Peopleware will be very wary of productivity tools like Slack.

Re: Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean while all of their windows friends are busy waiting for their windows updates to finish or that their windows friends couldn't figure out how to install slack?

When will Slack be availabe for my

[future assassin]

Slack box. I need it in a Snap because my BLT drive on my other computer just went AWOL

Re:When will Slack be availabe for my

[Anonymous Coward]

The last thing you need is Mr. Kawasaki asking you to commit hari kari.

Does Snap Require A User Account and Password?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the snap packaging system require that you register your computer with Ubuntu and then they track what is installed on your computer? That just doesn't feel like free open source to me. I avoid Snap because I don't want my open source computer monitored by a corporation that could be sold or hacked at anytime.

Is the World coming to an end?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phew!!

Snap ,slack, get back.......just gimme a command line.
  I don't mean to whine, but I'm a hack.
  I like my computing to be simple.
  No candy because of the pimple.
None of this GUI for the dandy.
I mean to compute and calculate.
Because this fancy shit is to masturbate.
That is it.

Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? Snaps seem good in theory but are absolutely horrible in practice. Whenever I have to deploy a snap I end up spending ages trying to fix problems with snap itself, then more time trying to fix problems with the actual snap itself.

At least snaps would somewhat redeem themselves if everyone agreed they'd be a good standard package format but there are already competitors to snap like flatpak.

Recently had Slack Advertisement in my Snail Mail

[grungeman]

It was full of marketing buzzwords. After I had finished reading I had no clue what Slack is about. And honestly, I am not too keen on finding out.

Slack for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Slack is Linux. One of the older distros, if memory serves.

I concur.. what the hell is a snap?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a hard-core pipe-hitting linux stud from way back and this is the first time ive ever heard of a snap.

-dirtbag

Is this progress? I don't know.

[OrangeTide]

We're going to get to the point where a chat program can't fit on a 650MB CD-ROM. I remember when I could only allocate 64kB chunks at a time in my programs.

Re:Is this progress? I don't know.

[Dog-Cow]

On macOS, Slack is 75MB on disk. A far cry from 650.

Re:Is this progress? I don't know.

[OrangeTide]

We're going to

That's future tense, if you didn't know. Also it's a rhetorical device and not a literal statement of fact, because I don't have the ability to flawlessly predict the future.

Re:Is this progress? I don't know.

[Anonymous Coward]

We probably shouldn't use rhetoric on here, as we may be misunderstood: Slashdot has all kinds of international users, even Americans.

(Irony, etc, likewise.)

groan...

[Anonymous Coward]

a pile of JS wrapped in a browser, wrapped in a container, wrapped in a OS, wrapped by hardware. How the fuck is this hailed as something great when we have had IRC for multiple decades?!

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Fuck that spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

use Mattermost instead.

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Slack? Snap?

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp {server}
get irc-{version}.tar.gz
exit
gzip -dc irc-{version}.tar.gz | tar xf
cd irc-{version}
make
make install

was good enough for Grandpa, and it's good enough for me.

Because of static linked libraries and resources

[HalAtWork]

That means you need to rely on the snap package maintainer to keep all components patched and up to date, rather than updating each component yourself through your normal package manager. I'm not sure how timely those updastes are. I would only use snaps to try bleeding edge releases and not for normal use.

Oh my...

[Anonymous Coward]

But isn't Slack a dirty, closed-source, piece of software?

Re:Missing the point

[Dog-Cow]

Many of my coworkers use Linux on their work laptops. We all use Slack.

Spotify snap crashes my user session

[RhettLivingston]

I tried the Spotify snap on Ubuntu 17.10 a couple of weeks ago. It turned out to be a very bloated logout tool. So much for my first excursion into optional snaps. Had to roll back to the package.

Hooray

[hattable]

Now we can be bugged no matter what OS we use. Back to HPUX for me I suppose.

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not helpful...

[TemporalBeing]

yeah, I use Slack; but I gave up on the Slack Desktop for Linux a while ago since SSO isn't integrated into anything else I use so it's just one more to login to that I could avoid by just using Slack in a browser. The Slack Desktop App is basically a browser dedicated to Slack any way; it doesn't do any special desktop integrations that Chrome/Firefox/etc don't already do. So it didn't add any real value.

WTF is Snap?

[Anonymous Coward]

How come I have been using Linux exclusively since 1998 or so, Debian much of that time, and I have no idea what Snap, "the universal Linux app packaging format" is?

creimy trying to leach off a +5 post

[Anonymous Coward]

ahahah! creimer trying to leach off a +5 post! :-)

creimer was never a snap, nor that bright at anything!

C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."

But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!

Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.

Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65

Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...

Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him, since it is impossible to do with Creimy:
http://ibb.co/mRVSaG

Creimy acting in educational resource document, he actually confirmed himself on Slashdot that he was handled by Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education! He is really a king Dumpty!:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...

Re:creimy trying to leach off a +5 post

[Anonymous Coward]

"Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."

How can he moderate since he says he hasn't had mod points in 15 years?

creimer wrote:

At least you have mod points. I haven't had mod points in 15 years. I wonder why...

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Then again, creimer is a compulsive liar!

Re:creimy trying to leach off a +5 post

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod points are not the same as meta moderating.

Re:creimy trying to leach off a +5 post

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and George Lucas' neck is not the same as "think football player".

Re:creimy trying to leach off a +5 post

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot ignores all metamods from negative karmas like yourself you dumb fat piece of shit!

Circa 2003!

--
Balena

Re:Missing the point

[slashrio]

Theory falsified! Next.

There is only one sexist creimertard!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one and only one creimertard; Christpher Dale Reimer, yourself, you fat disgusting sexist piece of lard!

Re:There is only one sexist creimertard!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the best you can do? Seriously? ROFL

Eh?

[Vranitzky]

Ubiquitous? Maybe I've been living under a rock, but.. What's this Slack thingy? yet another messenger/whatsapp/telegram/skype/...? How many more messaging programs are we going to need? if this is just an IRC client and they found a bunch of idiots willing to pay for it that much, good job. The world is full of people just waiting to waste money on this kind of shit. Of course the usual thing will happen: to justify the price, they're going to pile more and more crap on this client, until even the idiots will tire of that bloatedness and switch to something else. (iTunes, anyone?)

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