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

Only 147 MB

[tonique]

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

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

[DontBeAMoran]

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

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: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.