The Road to KDE Neon Core — Gosh We're Surrounded by Snaps Everywhere
summary
A fully snap-based Plasma desktop image called KDE Neon Core is built on Ubuntu Core with apps packaged as content and app snaps and a tiny Plasma session snap driving the runtime. Debugging exposes concrete failures: a deadlock between KWin/Wayland and xdg-desktop-portal producing a black screen, SNAP env var forcing a portal theme, and KIO/Discover needing patches. Workarounds include a temporary environment-clean systemd unit and a new systemd user control interface for snapd; a confined session eventually works but CI, packaging and unmerged interfaces still block wider publishing.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Introduction and project overview
- 1:27Ubuntu Core Desktop concept
- 3:16Basics of Snap packaging
- 7:43Snap confinement and execution
- 8:07KDE Neon Core architecture
- 10:02First boot provisioning
- 11:15Systemd integration and startup
- 12:48Black screen deadlock issue
- 15:44Snapd interface limitations
- 17:32KIO security workaround
- 18:47Confining the Plasma session
- 21:08Starting apps from confined session
- 22:39Application snap development
- 25:19Automated testing with Appium
- 26:27CI and build pipeline challenges
- 27:32Building system images and ISOs
- 29:19Debugging Snap issues
- 31:13Developer tooling and workarounds
- 32:44Current limitations and solutions
- 33:47Upcoming work and future plans
- 35:15Lessons learned and reflections
- 36:38How to contribute and acknowledgments
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