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

[Gravis Zero]

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

the first 3 times it failed during configure.

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.

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:Snap?

[apoc.famine]

Since no one else has.....