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.

Only 147 MB

[tonique]

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

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

[Gravis Zero]

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

the first 3 times it failed during configure.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[RightwingNutjob]

Bitcoin!

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:Snap?

[mattventura]

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

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

[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

[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

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

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.

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.....