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Thank you. That's very kind of you to say.

popeyon Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard

We tried various settings for the timeout from 150ms (too short) to 2s (too long) and settled on 250ms. Suggestions welcome on improving it! :D

popeyon Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard

Unclack was probably posted a couple of days ago. It was the inspiration for Hushboard.

popeyon Snaps: We Got Here

Author of the article here.

We have had some more recent conversations [0] about update control. There are also workarounds in the meantime [1].

  [0] - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/re-visiting-update-control-on-the-desktop/17170

  [1] - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snap-method-to-remove-auto-updates/21199

popeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2020)

Actually, no :) The team works on a number of (something)craft products. I suggested we call the team *craft (as a wildcard) but when you say it out loud it's "Star Craft", which kinda stuck :)

popeyon Show HN: I created an app using a no code tool

"Provide Feedback on any Drawings that peaks your interest!" It's "piques your interest".

popeyon Show HN: Sshwifty WebSSH (Alpha)

Neat! I've been looking for something like this for when I do training sessions with people who are stuck behind firewalls, or aren't super okay with Putty. Having a point-and-shoot web based way of getting a remote session on a server is super handy.

I note you've said in the repo readme that you don't accept PRs. How do you feel about people distributing binary builds - for example in Linux distros?

popeyon Show HN: CLI tool for saving web pages as a single file

Amusing that you should mention Canonical "snaps". I made a snap of monolith and contributed the yaml upstream. https://snapcraft.io/monolith - it's in the edge channel because upstream haven't done a stable release yet. It's a strictly confined application.

popeyon Show HN: Commandeer 0.2.2 Released – Multi-Cloud Desktop App, New Service – EC2

Interesting! I'd not seen this before. I like the idea of a central place to manage these services, because I find some of them have utterly impenetrable UIs. Good if you're using multiple services.

I work on Snapcraft. As this is an electron app, you might want to consider making a snap of it available in the Snap Store, so it's more widely discoverable by developers on Linux desktops. I wrote a blog post detailing how over here https://snapcraft.io/blog/bringing-electron-applications-to-...

I'd be happy to help promote the application if/when you choose to land it in the Snap Store.

popeyon Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13

Snaps work on at least 40 different distros last time I looked. They remove a significant chunk of that 'library compatibility' because they ship the necessary dependencies in the package. While Ubuntu dominates the Linux desktop market, by a couple of orders of magnitude, we made snaps with the express intention of them working on all the major leading distros. The goal being to ensure you don't need to test on all those different distros. One snap to rule them all ;)

popeyon Flatpak – a security nightmare

Not true. The snaps you list are not classic by virtue of being electron. There's plenty of electron apps in the snap store which are not classic, but strictly confined. It's the default for electron apps built with electron-builder.

popeyon Microsoft intercepting Firefox, Chrome installation on Windows 10 Insider build

No. We don't.

popeyon Show HN: Nip – search for and download BBC iplayer tv programmes

   alan@hal:~$ get-iplayer --help | grep category
    --category <string>                                 Narrow search to matched categories (comma-separated regex list).  Defaults to substring match.  Only works with --history.
    --exclude-category <string>                         Narrow search to exclude matched categories (comma-separated regex list).  Defaults to substring match.  Only works with --history.

popeyon Opera launches as a snap for Linux users

We only recently added the "verified accounts" feature. Many of the apps you listed are actually from verified accounts but we're in the process of validating them. We should have all the major ones done soon.

popeyon A first look at Ubuntu desktop metrics

I'd imagine a significant chunk of "auto login" choosers are running Ubuntu in a VM on some other platform.

popeyon Malware Found in the Ubuntu Snap Store

The build service at build.snapcraft.io is what builds it. Anyone can hook up their github repo (containing a snapcraft.yaml) to build and have to automatically rebuild the snap when changes in the git repo occur. It then pushes the snap to the 'edge' channel in the store. Developer validates that build and then pushes to stable for all users.

popeyon Malware Found in the Ubuntu Snap Store

No. Snap is not a proprietary format at all. It's a squashfs file with a small amount of metadata. You can make a snap by plopping a file in a folder, add a simple snap.yaml which describes the application and then "make" a snap with the common mksquashfs tool.

There is room in the world for flatpak and snap to co-exist. We created snaps as an evolution on from clicks on the Ubuntu phone, and it covers use cases that flatpak wasn't designed for.

popeyon Malware Found in the Ubuntu Snap Store

Because the same snap can run on releases of Ubuntu all the way back to 14.04. 14.04 has VLC 2.1 in the repo. 16.04 LTS has VLC 2.2. The snap store has 3.0.1 in the stable channel, with 4.0 (dev release) in the edge channel. Versions that will never be in the archive of those older releases.

As LTS releases age, the contents of the repo age with them. PPAs are one solution, but they're undiscoverable and not straightforward for new users to setup. Ubuntu has a ton of users who are 'sticky' on old LTS releases.

This enables the VLC developer to have one package that targets millions of users across lots of releases of Ubuntu - and other distros too.

popeyon Malware Found in the Ubuntu Snap Store

You can. The store used to default to "Proprietary" if the developer didn't set it. Now we default to "Unknown" if not specified by the developer.

popeyon Slack comes to Linux as a snap

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

popeyon Slack comes to Linux as a snap

snap install slack-term ;)

popeyon Slack comes to Linux as a snap

Not any more.

popeyon Slack comes to Linux as a snap

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

popeyon Show HN: Flying Carpet – Ad-hoc wireless, cross-platform, encrypted file sharing

This is rather neat. Sorry to be that guy, but any plans to support Linux too?

popeyon Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

This is so handy. I pushed it to the snap store. So if you're on a snap supported Linux distro you can just run "snap install wormhole" to get it and future updates.

popeyon Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

They're certainly easier to create than debs. For many applications a single yaml file is all that's needed. Snapcraft can use whatever build system the app needs, and produce a snap which can be locally installed, shared privately or more widely via the snap store. I made a short video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLxqdf89hRo

popeyon Ubuntu 17.04 review

Just a minor point but uappexplorer is a community maintained site which uses the snap store API to present apps in the store. It's open source, hosted on github and I'm sure they'd welcome contributors to help improve the look and feel. https://github.com/bhdouglass/uappexplorer

There's a few other ways to view the snaps in the store though. On the Ubuntu desktop there is snap support in Ubuntu Software, and if you "snap install snapweb" you'll get a pretty web portal on port 4200 on the local machine. This can also be installed on remote machines so you can manage the snaps installed there too.

popeyon Show HN: Ffscreencast – CLI-based screencasts for OS X, Linux, BSD

Pulse has more features, but sits atop alsa. So it's not generally one or the other as pulse still needs alsa underneath. I don't have any docs on which is 'better' but a quick search reveals a lot of opinion on the matter. Bear in mind many Linux distros introduced Pulse a little early (Ubuntu [my employer] included). This caused quite a bit of hatred for it, as it was a bit unstable. Now those issues are mostly gone, and it Just Works™.