We’ve covered the basics, so now it’s time to perform the final steps needed to get Ubuntu W ready for action. You may want to integrate online accounts – for example, you might want to have Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive files available in the file manager. Or receive desktop notifications for Gmail, Microsoft or other email accounts. You can even integrate with MS Exchange or Kerberos resources if you want to connect to corporate environments. All these (and more) are available in the Online Accounts section of the Settings app.
Earlier we mentioned installing new applications and introduced the idea of repositories, but we didn’t give you the whole story. The traditional repo system meant that apps were packaged by distribution packaging teams, rather than the app developers themselves. This ensured compatibility with that distro, but also meant that programs in the repos lagged behind what you’d find if you got the source code (from the likes of GitHub or Gitlab) and compiled it yourself. Over the past few years, a couple of new technologies have emerged that make it easier for app developers to release their wares in a distro-agnostic manner, either by including all the required libraries (this is how AppImages work) or by building against standardised runtime bundles. While Flatpak (and https://flathub.org store) is gaining popularity for GUI apps, Canonical is pushing ahead with its own format – Snaps.
Apart from making life easier for devs and distro teams, these universal packaging formats all offer some degree of confinement for increased security. Snaps and Flatpaks have fine-grained permission management, so they can only access the resources they need. When you search for something in the App Center, the search bar separates the results into Snap packages and Debian packages (Ubuntu is based on Debian). All the featured apps there are Snaps nowadays, and Canonical is keen to point out that Snaps can be used to package system services and server tools, which Flatpak is not designed for.
Good (sn)apples and bad apples