Following the recent addition of easy DBus service snapping in the snap binary bundle format, I am happy to say that we now have some of our KDE Applications in the Ubuntu 16.04 Snap Store.
To use them you need to first manually install the kde-frameworks-5Â snap. Once you have it installed you can install the applications. Currently we have available:
- ktuberling – The most awesome game ever!
- kbruch – Learn how to do fractions (I almost failed at first exercise :O)
- katomic – Fun and education in one
- kblocks – Tetris-like game
- kmplot – Plotting mathematical functions
- kgeography – An education application for learning states/countries/capitals
- kollision – Casual ball game
- kruler – A screen ruler to measure pixel distance on your screen
The Ubuntu 16.04 software center comes with Snap store support built in, so you can simply search for the application and should find a snap version for installation. As we are still working on stabilizing Snap support in Plasma’s Discover, for now, you have to resort to a terminal to test the snaps on KDE neon.
To get started using the command line interface of snap you can do the following:
sudo snap install kde-frameworks-5 sudo snap install kblocks
All currently available snaps are auto generated. For some technical background check out my earlier blog post on snapping KDE applications. In the near future I hope to get manually maintained snaps also built automatically. Also from-git delivery to the edge channel is very much a desired feature still. Stay tuned.
💺 Blog 
This is great, at some point we’ll need to discuss how this fits with KDE Applications releasing/scheduling.
Awesome! 🙂
May I ask why KDE apps in Ubuntu Store are marked as “non-free”?
No clue. Probably a bug in gnome software.
Awesome! Why the lower-case names tho? 🙂
Some of these snaps do work, but this one does not:
$ /snap/bin/katomic
katomic: error while loading shared libraries: libKF5Crash.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
“To use them you need to first manually install the kde-frameworks-5 snap. “
If you installed katomic first (before the framework) you need to remove it, then install the framework and install again, otherwise the error remains.
katomic now starts on my system. I rebooted it to change kernels and it fixed the problem without removing/installing katomic.
This is a serious flaw in snap. dpkg and flatpak do not suffer from similar installation ordering issues.
Well, snapd doesn’t have a concept of dependencies yet. It is being worked on though.