14 DAY TRIAL // Long-time KDE Community developer Harald Sitter has been working lately on creating a sharable KDE Frameworks Snap that would make snapping of KDE applications for Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distros a lot easier and fun.
In a recent blog post, the developer explains how he managed to bundle KDE apps as Snaps while trying to make them as smaller as possible. The size of the downloadable binary Snap and Flatpak packages, as well as AppImage or other similar technology, always appeared to have been an issue for most users.
In order for Snaps and Flatpaks to be adopted by the mass, they need to be smaller, and thanks to the hard work of Harald Sitter, there's now a Snap version of the KDE Frameworks 5 collection of add-on libraries for Qt 5, which KDE developers are using to develop KDE applications for the Plasma 5 desktop environment.
KDE Frameworks 5 content Snap now available in the Ubuntu Store
The idea for the KDE Frameworks 5 content Snap came after Harald Sitter tried to package the KCalc calculator utility as a Snap, which had no less than 70MB in size. "This allows us to share a common core of libraries and other content across all applications, making the individual applications just as big as they need to be. KCalc is only 312 KiB without translations," explained the developer.
If you want to see an example of snapping KDE applications with the shareable kde-frameworks-5 content Snap, which is now available in the edge channel of the Ubuntu Store, we invite you to read the entire blog article written by Harald Sitter, as well as watch the video presentation below. Canonical has also been working on making Snaps smaller with the latest release of Snapd.
