As a blog publisher, I say this a lot, sometimes I look at Discover (the Kubuntu software center) to see if there are any new apps to talk about. The vast majority of the new features that appear (in my case) are those that are added or updated in Flathub, but few of the APT repositories and Snap packages. Well, technically, this does not change in the store that we will talk about in this post, which is none other than the Snap Store.
When I want to see if there is something new, until now I had to go to snapcraft.io, but the news does not appear either. In any case, the noticia that I have read today has made me discover the official Linux store for Snap packages. As you can see in the screenshot that heads this article or if you decide to install it, it is a store very much like the Ubuntu software center. In fact, it is built on GNOME.
The Snap Store is built on GNOME
As in the Ubuntu software center, in the Snap Store we have "All" and "Installed". To be the same in this sense, the "Updates" section is missing. In the "Installed" section, only software related to Snap packages appears, so if we do not have many packages of this type installed, what we will see will be very little software.
Personally, I don't see much point in installing the Snap Store on operating systems like Ubuntu. The news appears in the software center (you can check it right now by seeing that Krita appears), so we do not win anything in this regard. Yes it can serve us if what we want is to search and download only and exclusively Snap packages.
To install it, just open a terminal and type:
sudo snap install snap-store
What do you think of the Snap Store? Are you going to install it or do you prefer to do everything with the software center?
What crap this from the snap store each new version of Ubuntu deteriorates in the end, uninstall Ubuntu 17.04 because it also freezes a lot and is very difficult to master in general. Installing a program is quite an adventure. If you are lucky, your Ubuntu software doesn't freeze or crash. If I use the window selector a lot, it freezes my PC. I have tested it on different PCs and different Ubuntus 14, 16, 17, 18, 19. I stick with Ubuntu 11.10 Oneriric Ocelot
F Pormi, Ami does not install it for me (The snap "snap-store" is already installed; see "snap help refresh") xD
Yes, but I install it on debian, because there is an application that is only available in the Snap package and I need FBReader, but it does not appear in the menu to launch it. I look in the snap folder in the home directory and I see the snap-store folder and it's somewhat empty so I go to the /snap/snap-store/current/usr/bin directory to see if it runs there, but nothing. When I go to the page https://snapcraft.io/ and I click the "View in desktop store" button then snap-store runs without problem. FBReader also doesn't show up in the start menu on my desktop (Mate) nor does it have a folder in the home snap address, just /snap/fbreader. When I try to run snap-store in console it asks me for libgspell-1.so.2 library but I can't get it in debian repositories. When I try to run FBReader in the console from its installation directory /snap/fbreader/current/bin it asks me for this library: libicuuc.so.66, I don't have it in the debian repositories and it doesn't run. I'm going to see how I get those libraries for debian and see if I can solve it. The drawback that I see for Snap is that packaging is starting to be done only in Snap for some applications. On the one hand, it has advantages, because you may not have problems with the libraries when moving to new updates to the operating system, but it loses the advantage of sharing libraries between various applications, which saves space.
Thanks for the reply. I already found the solution.
The launchers are located at this address:
/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications
There I was able to run both Snap-store without problems (which, as you say, it is not necessary to install it either) and the FBReader launcher.
I wrote to FBReader's Telegram channel and they told me where to find their program's launcher and I found the snap-store one too. I have written the solution on my blog but whoever wants is free to copy the solution.
To add the icon to the menu simply using menulibre that is in the repositories.