I thought for sure when I searched the Purism forums for the keyword SNAPS that i would find talks about using snap apps (all in one program with built-in dependencies) for the Librem5. Snaps will work on Purisms Laptops just like any other linux distro. In order to get snap applications to work on the librem5, would that mean that they would have to be built specifically for the librem5 CPU architecture?
From what Ive read, snaps can segregate their files from other files on a system. SnapCraft Store
Someone please education me on this idea of if its a possibility or not and why either way.
As far as i undaerstand it snaps need to be compiled for arm64 to be usable on the librem5 as any other program dose. On snapcraft you can check if its available next to the install button on the program page.
e.g. Blender is just available as amd64 (desktop 64bit)
while Telegram is available as amd64 (desktop 64bit), i386 (desktop 3bit) and armhf (arm 32bit / amr7)
So depends on the maintainer if it will be available. Snap and flatpak just unifies the packaging across distros they does not make any program work on any architecture.
What i’m not sure about is if armhf binaries run on arm64 CPUs. This might be the case. Just don’t know.
It’s also worth mentioning that Purism seem to push Flatpak more than snaps, for example their app development documentation recommends packaging third-party apps developed for the Librem5 with Flatpak
https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Packaging_Apps/index.html
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It’s possible yes, but it requires that all its dependencies are also armhf similarly to how you sometimes need 32-bit libraries for some programs on Linux.
So in theory it might work to run a flatpak/snap built for armhf on an arm64 platform since it contains all the dependencies already, but my guess is that it’s not tested though so who knows if this is actually the case.
I was able to run snap on the dev kit.
I had to build a custom kernel with CONFIG_CGROUP_FREEZER enabled to make it work atm.
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