Ubuntu: KDE snaps Love KDE neon and Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur"
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Why KDE snaps Love KDE neon and the Big Move.
KDE neon is extremely important to the KDE snaps eco-system as I briefly mentioned in my last post.
Why? KDE neon is based on Jammy LTS which is the same as Core 22 base for snaps. Neon has a very useful continuous integration system in place that tests all the things, including dependencies, qml, cmake errors, debian packaging lintian tool and the list go on. This is very important to get packages out that don’t break things on user desktops. Once the packages are a lovely shade of green on the neon CI ( or at least all the important issues are resolved ) it is in good shape for snapping. I have scripts that pull the build and runtime dependency information for our application package to use in the snapcraft.yaml. We know this list is complete, because it passed the tests!
As applications gain features, they requires newer dependencies than what is provided in the ubuntu jammy repositories. Neon builds those newer dependencies and provides them to our users in the neon aptly repositories. It is much easier and more reliable than tracking down PPAs and hoping they stay maintained. We use the neon user edition repository in our snapcraft file to ensure we are up to date on KDE applications dependency needs.
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What's New in Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur"
The Fall 2023 interim release of Ubuntu Linux will hit the streets on October 12th, 2023. Complete with its obligatory alliterative animal-based code name, this latest spin of the extremely Linux distribution boasts GNOME 45, Kernel 6.5, and a new Flutter-based App Center.
Mantic is the 39th release of Ubuntu. It’s an interim release, meaning it will receive nine months of support including bug fixes, hot fixes, and updates. The Ubuntu release sequence is to have three interim releases, then a Long Term Support release. LTS releases are supported for five years. Mantic is the third of the current run of interim releases, meaning the next Ubuntu release, 24.04, will be an LTS release.
With an LTS version just around the corner, is it worth upgrading to this latest, short-lived interim build? We installed the Ubuntu 23.10 beta to find out. Because it is a beta build, there’s an outside chance there may be slight differences between the version we tested and the final release.