Slack comes to Linux as a snap

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/18/slack-comes-to-linux-as-a-snap/

by artsandsci • 9 years ago

64 66 9 years ago

techcrunch.com

dsr_• 9 years ago

It's still a 150MB web-browser + attached web app, right?

Spivak2• 9 years ago

Well yeah, it's not like how it's packaged changed the underlying design.

If you want a lightweight version of the slack client and don't fell like using the IRC or XMPP bridges you can use Epiphany (or Chromium) to install the website an an 'App'.

quiq• 9 years ago

There is also wee-slack[0], a plug-in for weechat specifically that does more than the IRC gateway

[0] https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

j_s• 9 years ago

eul.im is a closed-source commercial lightweight chat client launched 6 months ago; the author spent a few months advertising on related discussions until snagging a bit of critical feedback. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eul.im&sort=byDate&type=commen... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597468 (apparently it still downloads a 180MB embedded browser https://github.com/eul-im/eul/issues/60)

There is also https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical (no development since initial October appearance) CLI and:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597508 >nikisweeting: https://github.com/saenzramiro/rambox [...] https://github.com/meetfranz/franz [...] share one Electron instance for all your chat services

jerf• 9 years ago

I find just pinning the tab (right-click on tab, select Pin Tab) on Firefox does what I need it to do. I mention this because I suspect many people are unaware the feature exists.

Pinning a tab gives it permanent priority on the left-hand side of the tab list, and elides the title from the tab, so it is just the favicon. It also blocks CTRL-w from closing the tab; you have to actually right-click and either unpin or close the tab. That may sound trivial, but was the biggest problem I had running it in the browser before, it got caught in my periodic tab cleanups accidentally. Now I never accidentally close it.

dschep• 9 years ago

Filesize on snapcraft.io is right around 150MB[0]

[0] https://snapcraft.io/slack/

Jaepa2• 9 years ago

Yup. Fortunately this is not 2010 where that would more than 0.1% of the storage space on your typical machine.

sz4kerto• 9 years ago

Still dog slow on my 20C/64G box. :/

microtonal• 9 years ago

But you know as well as anyone else that the problem with browser-based apps is that they take hundreds of megabytes of memory. And unfortunately, memory is still scarce (no thanks to Intel for not supporting LP-DDR4 in mobile SKUs).

Spivak2• 9 years ago

For you Flatpak users out there Slack is also available on Flathub as well.

https://flathub.org/apps.html

mijoharas• 9 years ago

What exactly is Flatpak?

KerrickStaley• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak

sgift• 9 years ago

I just run it in the browser (on Windows) ... the slack app has the tendency to consume ever larger amounts of RAM if I let it run for a while. I have the feeling they just append each new message and never clear old messages out of memory, but I never cared enough to actually check. Just banning it back into the browser solved it.

seanp2k2• 9 years ago

https://slack.engineering/introducing-electron-to-the-window...

Even when it's the "native" app, it's kind of still running in a browser (it uses Electron).

JeanMarcS• 9 years ago

« this will open Slack up to users of Linux-based services like ArchLinux, OpenSUSE, Solus, Debian, KDE Neon and others. » I don’t get it. I use the slack app on my Debian for almost a year. Am I missing something ?

taoistextremist• 9 years ago

I literally have it open right now. They've supplied slack in .deb and .rpm files for a bit now AFAIK.

owaislone• 9 years ago

Their hope is that they won't have to maintain for multiple packaging formats and distros. Just ship 1 snap and cover everything. That's what they hope to get out of it.

wjoe• 9 years ago

Similarly been using it on Arch for a few years. Looks like they only advertise downloads for Ubuntu and Fedora on their sites, but in the end they're just deb and rpm files. And in the end deb and rpms are just archives of files.

I guess snaps, flatpak, etc remove the step of needing someone to make a package or otherwise work out the dependencies and steps needed to install it on a given other distro, but chances are non-deb/rpm based distros either have their own maintaners that do these things, or the users are happy to work it out themselves.

Technologies like snaps do solve the issue of developers having to think about supporting different distros, but they add extra overhead too. I'd rather they just provide a tar and a list of dependencies and use a package from AUR myself.

kahnpro• 9 years ago

I think solving there problem of easy distribution is faaaaaaar more important than the small overhead involed.

subway• 9 years ago

It means they're probably tired of maintaining standards such that their application can run on multiple distros, and have decided to shove it in a container.

I love the idea of snaps, but good grief they sometimes have really backwards build processes -- start with a traditional rootfs, install packages, delete cruft (pray you didn't delete the wrong cruft), export and call it a day.

api3• 9 years ago

I really sympathize with this view. At ZeroTier we try to support multiple distributions and versions of distributions going back quite a while and it is hell on wheels. It's so tempting to just build everything as a static binary and let the user figure out how to support the three different init systems that can each be configured in seven different ways.

Linux has far too many distributions. They really aren't that different, so I have a hard time understanding why they exist. The community as a whole would benefit hugely if e.g. Debian and CentOS/RedHat/Fedora merged, but I understand that's not going to happen for stupid political reasons.

evand2• 9 years ago

I wouldn't call the snap build process for Electron apps backwards:

  npm install -g electron-builder # for brevity, --save-dev works
  electron-builder --linux snap --x64
  ls dist/*.snap

There's no operating system rootfs in your snap. That lives in the core snap.

felixrieseberg• 9 years ago

Slack desktop engineer here: We're not discontinuing anything – we're just offering more options.

beal• 9 years ago

I'd like to hear from anyone that is using snaps. I'm currently using Ubuntu 17.10 and have heard of them but haven't noticed them anywhere. Is it something I should consider using? Generally happy with slack in the browser currently.

Animats• 9 years ago

There's a "bug" which requires a Ubuntu account to load "snaps". It hasn't been fixed, despite claims that a Ubuntu account is unnecessary for that function.

toyg6• 9 years ago

Uhm, i never had an Ubuntu account and am pretty sure I tried a few snaps last time I checked out Ubuntu.

popey4• 9 years ago

That was a bug, it was fixed just before Christmas.

toyg6• 9 years ago

They worked fine in my experience. The isolation is a nice concept, although it pollutes /etc/mtab (each app will appear as a mounted volume). It definitely helps developers not having to worry about .deb and .rpm, you configure a snap and then Ubuntu has automated services that will do all heavy lifting for you.

skykooler• 9 years ago

I wonder if this will give them some impetus to get calling working properly on Linux?

davidw• 9 years ago

Calling works fine in Chrome for me.

echlebek• 9 years ago

I use calling in Linux all the time, including screen sharing. It seems to work fine. Korora on X1 Carbon 5G.

maguirre• 9 years ago

I use calling too and it works fairly well. However when sharing my screen i have to share "all my monitors" does anyone know why it's done this way?

sandGorgon2• 9 years ago

Firefox and Slack are only on Snap and not on Flatpak. Is there a reason why this is happening ?

bengotow• 9 years ago

I can’t speak for Slack, but I ship Mailspring for Linux as a Snap (and not a Flatpak) because snap provides a unified approach to automatic updates and the app is updated frequently. It’s an a major win from a developer perspective, because users that have to install the new deb / rpm / flatpak manually are almost certainly going to fall behind and then file bugs / have issues that take up time to triage.

(I know there’s a way to do autoupdate with Flatpak, but it is not tested and maintained as part of Flatpak itself, and when I looked it seemed to be a proof of concept with no production use!)

alexlarsson2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by the flatpak comment. "flatpak update" is the (built-in) command update all your installed flatpaks.

What is not built in is a daemon that regularly runs this, because the idea is to integrate that with the UI. So, the application installation ui you use (gnome-software or kde discover) will regularly call this update for you, however you configure it.

TingPing3• 9 years ago

There has been a Firefox Flatpak for a long time: https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/

And there has been discussions about getting an official one from Mozilla.

jcastro2• 9 years ago

Any plans on submitting this to flathub?

sandGorgon2• 9 years ago

Umm..I did implicitly mean official. Sorry, if I made it seem as if it was technically not possible.

I'm asking about why it was chosen not to.

alexlarsson2• 9 years ago

Slack is packaged as flatpak on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps.html

Various versions of firefox as flatpak are here: https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/

Getting some of those on flathub is a work in progress.

moocowtruck• 9 years ago

is this like nix?

o_____________o• 9 years ago

This is the first I'm hearing about Snap, what do you guys think of that as a platform?

toyg6• 9 years ago

I like it quite a bit, even applied for the related dev-advocacy job (and was resoundingly ignored; rightly so, I might add). It removes the complexity layer of having to deal with multiple packaging systems, and it isolates the app at the user level which helps with dependencies.

The only issue I see, really, is that it does not appeal to the traditional Linux userbase, the greybeards and neckbeards who are used to all the packaging esoterica. It’s a user-friendly concept that happens to be very developer-friendly too, but has no appeal for the sysadmin crew, which is still the majority in Linux land. So it risks being ignored.

cmurf• 9 years ago

I've been using a Slack flatpak for months, from flathub.org

rrggrr• 9 years ago

Slack's UI makes me insane. As a snap, or otherwise the lack of customizability, lack of minimalism and inability to size the UI to my liking makes me hate using it. I'm stuck with it and it feels like chat prison.

shimon• 9 years ago

You may want to check out https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

Raphmedia• 9 years ago

There's a lot of third party command line clients :

https://github.com/evanyeung/terminal-slack

https://github.com/regisb/slack-cli

https://github.com/juanpabloaj/slacker-cli

etc.

popey4• 9 years ago

snap install slack-term ;)

cmiles74• 9 years ago

I've had good luck with this plugin for Weechat.

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

WD-422• 9 years ago

If you happen to be using gnome I wrote a small script that uses the relay plugin so you can get native notifications even if your weechat is remote: https://github.com/Fingel/weelisten

That got rid of the last thing I felt was lacking when I started using weechat.

WD-422• 9 years ago

The fact that they provide an irc gateway is the only saving grace for me. Really not looking forward to the day they retire it. But I'm sure it'll come.

wasd• 9 years ago

I wasn't able to get it working through software center but this worked.

$ sudo snap install slack --classic

popey4• 9 years ago

Yeah, that bug is being fixed and working through the release process right now.

butz• 9 years ago

1) Wait for browsers to implement adding PWAs to desktop 2) Write once, run everywhere 3) Everyone is happy

Slack comes to Linux as a snap

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