Provide a snap package for Linux users

[qgib]

Author Name: Kristijan Zic (@KristijanZic) Original Redmine Issue: 17710

Redmine category:build/install

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Please consider packaging QGIS as a snap package as it is a universal package and basically a new standard that works on any Linux distribution and it can bundle all dependencies regardless of the ones that come with the distro so you can push the new package to the users that have for ex. older versions of Qt with their distro without it conflicting with the QGIS one.

So there should be one package that works on any distro without any conflicts or distro specific hackery.

Here is the website of the tool for building snap packages. Snapcraft - a tool for creating snaps. https://snapcraft.io/

[qgib]

Author Name: Patrick Dunford (@enzedrailmaps)

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There is already been some work on an AppImage package I prefer the AppImage which can be installed in multiple versions for Linux, currently this is not possible without building from source.

[qgib]

Author Name: Kristijan Zic (@KristijanZic)

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Snaps can be installed in multiple versions for Linux too. The issue with AppImages afaik is that they are not confined and thus not secure, probably for that reason they don't have a store and cannot be published on any distro's appstore. Snaps on the other hand can. With snaps you can also have multiple tracks/channels of the app in the store like stable, development, beta, edge etc. and users can pick from which channel to install and if not it will install stable by default. That could really help with testing qgis since users could easily switch between channels if they want, and without them conflicting with each other or the OS version of libs. Snaps can be distributed like downloadable packages on the website or using a store like Gnome Software or a cli store. No need to first make a package executable in order to run it like you have to do with AppImages etc.

[qgib]

Author Name: Luigi Pirelli (@luipir)

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give a look also to: https://gist.github.com/elopio/e054f40e11761f2aa02a04d8339a880f

https://github.com/Wollac/snap-qgis

and

https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3545

[Lvaskz]

This is so old

give a look also to: https://gist.github.com/elopio/e054f40e11761f2aa02a04d8339a880f

https://github.com/Wollac/snap-qgis

and

3545

I think this projects are not maintained. So long time has past and I do not see some progress with Qgis snap

[nyalldawson]

There's an actively maintained, stable flatpak version available. I think there's no movement here because snaps just haven't proved popular for desktop applications.

[Lvaskz]

There's an actively maintained, stable flatpak version available.

I know thanks, the problem is only one branch as flatpak development release 3.8.3, the stable release is not available. I think with appimage we have both releases 3.4.12 and 3.8.3 I hope