 You guys know I love universal packaging formats on Linux I like all three of the major ones snaps flat packs and app images I talk about app images all the time here on the channel and you guys love to laugh at me every time I bring up App images. Oh app images. They're not really secure Blah blah blah blah blah and you flat pack haters love to talk about how flat packs are not really sandbox Crackling this and that and everything and snaps well the problem with snaps is canonical is behind it It's got this corporation behind it and they run the snap store There's only one snap store all the snaps are in it canonical runs it and the problem with that is that the snap servers is all Proprietary the back end of it is proprietary. That doesn't mean the snaps themselves are proprietary when you install a snap on your system That's probably free and open-source software for the most part as long as the program is free and open-source software Now there are snaps of proprietary programs But don't think by you guys using snaps that you're installing proprietary software I think some people get that kind of twisted But yes the servers at the snap store where you're actually downloading the packages from that's owned by canonical and it's proprietary It's not open-source, but there's nothing stopping anybody from creating their own Repository of snap packages and that's what this guy posted a few days ago over on Twitter He announced the first beta of LOL, which is an open-source alternative to the snap server It's been released of this guy's name is Rudra. So was what I probably mispronounced your name I do apologize if that's the case he claims that the LOL server is Independent from the snap store servers It has the core snaps included of course and he also packaged up two other snaps discord and telegram And this is more of a proof-of-concept. He just packaged a few things just to show you guys that this can be done And LOL the source code for it is hosted over on git lab and it looks like it's a archived project So we might actually try to get this installed here. I actually haven't tried this yet But LOL he calls it a variant of snap and you can make go it as a fork of snap Because you can't really use the snap commands You can't do snap install name of program like snap install discord For example, it's gonna go to the official snap store canonical snap store to get discord You want LOL's version of discord? What you want to do is you want to do LOL install discord or whatever name of program So this is the source code for LOL and the LOL server is also hosted over here on git lab let me go to the LOL server here and If you want to see the packages that are packaged up go into this directory here and you can say it's got the core snaps It also has a hello world snap. That's just a standard It just prints out hello world for you That's how you know if your snap installation actually works or not That's typically how people test it and of course he packaged up discord and telegram and there's also the validity sensor tools I'm not sure what that is. So he should get you know, three or four snaps here other than of course the core snaps So I'm actually gonna try to set this up and see if this will work So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna switch over to this virtual machine This is a virtual machine of Ubuntu 21.04. Let me go ahead and open a terminal I'll make it full screen and let me zoom in and the first thing we want to do is we want to get clone the LOL repository. So that was hosted over at HTTPS colon slash slash git lab Dot com slash his username was LOL dash snap slash and the repository was simply called LOL and Let's see git is not currently installed Ubuntu does not install git out of the box. So let me quickly install git All right git finished installing Let me clear the screen and then I'm gonna up arrow to get back to the git clone command And now it should work if I do it LS now we see the LOL Repository here in our home directory I'm gonna cd into that lol directory if I do it LS you can see I have a license read me and then I have a Program lol and then snap here which snap is a directory. So lol is actually an executable It's a program if I did a long form LS LS space dash la you can see Lol you can see it's executable. It has some x's in the file permissions That's means it's a script that can actually be executed. It can be ran. It's a program Now to use lol the snap daemon has to be running It has to be installed on your system and already running being that I'm doing this on Ubuntu Ubuntu has snap already Installed out of the box the snapd daemon is already running out of the box So I don't have to do anything in that regard I was doing this on another distribution say arch Linux for example Then I would also as a prerequisite I would also need to install snap and make sure that the snapd daemon is running and now that we have Lol installed I'm gonna execute a command with lol that program there Lol and it looks like reading their get lab. The first thing you want to do is refresh. So do lol refresh Lol, so it's gonna refresh the lol package I guess is what that is and it says lol command not found maybe I should have prefaced Lol with dot slash lol because it's probably more like a Python script or something like that It's not a it's not a proper binary. Simply saying lol is not gonna work. So let me do period slash lol Refresh lol and says please run as root. So we got to be root to execute this script as well And it looks like it is running. Yes so it is updating the Lol packages you can see verified the downloaded snap and it's gonna refresh I'm assuming it's gonna refresh the lol package itself Yeah, and we get a output here lol beta 1 dot 1 is installed So from here what I could do is I could again as sudo And honestly you need sudo privileges to do the snap commands too. So typically you do sudo snap install You know for whatever snap package you're installing. So same thing sudo lol, but remember the period and the slash lol Install and this time what was packaged and in the lol server. We had discord telegram There was also the hello world program. So let me see if I can install that and It's taking a few seconds for the download. All right. It says hello is installed Let's see if we could actually run this. So is there hello. Yeah, hello world That's all that program is all it does is echo hello world at the command line But that is a very simple snap just to verify that your snap installation or in this case our lol Installation is actually working. So this is really cool. I love the fact that you know again This is more of just a proof of concept that anybody can create their own third-party snap server And all you need to do basically is just fork lol. He's already done the work for you He's shown you he's got this lol script basically and he's got his own lol dash server And here's the thing with lol you can actually set it to use any server by default It's using lol dash server here You know, it's using all these packages here, right? But you can set up your own lol Server it doesn't have to be called lol server But you can set up your own github or get lab repository of your own snap packages and have lol use your own Repository so this really opens the door for a lot more people to create snap packages If for some reason the one thing holding you back from using snaps is that you've got the one snap store That's run by canonical if that's the reason that you truly hate snaps for those of you that can play Look that's that's not the case anybody can create their own snap packages I've created many of my own snap packages and they're very portable I can keep them on a USB stick I can you know take them around with me and install my own snaps on any machine if I Wanted to host my own repository over on get lab, you know, I could do that as well I'm not that invested in snap. So I probably won't do that these days. I'm mostly invested in packaging for arch Linux I have my own arch repositories, but this was an excellent job I have job well done on the lol package and the lol dash server now before I go I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode Gabe James Mitchell Paul Scott with a commie Alan Chuck commander angry dieokai David Dylan Gregory haiko Lee Maxim Michael Mike Nitrix early on Alexander peace arch and the door polytech raver red Prophet Stephen and Willie these guys They're my has tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode about the lol fork of snap It wouldn't have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well All these names are seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys the community If you like my work and want to help me out, please support distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace The snap haters are about as bad as the system D haters