KDE Discover is shaping up to be the go-to store front for installing applications and add-ons on the Plasma desktop — and now we learn that its improving the handling of Snap apps, too.
Reporting on discussions that took place at the recent Snap sprint hosted by Canonical in London is KDE dev Aleix Pol.
Pol reports that, while a Snap backend for Discover has been in testing for a while, the integration of Snap apps in to Discover is now more robust and simpler to maintained. Furthermore, he’s hopeful that a stable snap back-end could ship in Plasma 5.11.
“One of the reasons holding us back was the lack of AppStream support both in few spaces: getting proper information from the application, leveraging the appstream identifiers. This will allow snap software centers to have rich information ready for users to better choose their software,” Aleix Pol says in his post.
“My understanding is that the development of these features is well under way and should be available to us soon.”
Snap app creation and adoption is really picking up steam, due in part to its distro-agnostic distribution potential. Software developers will be keen for their Snaps to be used by as many Linux users on as many distros and desktops as possible.
But there’s still some way to go for that. One of the biggest gripes in terms of desktop Snap apps is the current lack of theme integration, mainly around GTK and Qt themes, but also including fonts, icons, and more.
The good news is that work to make desktop Snaps look as good as they run is on the way. Those UI tweaks combined with greater visibility in software stores like KDE Discover and GNOME Software, point to a promising future for Snap app adoption.