Atom snap fails on Ubuntu 24.04

snapcraft
1

I installed atom on Ubuntu 24.04, the current Ubuntu LTS release, but it crashes. I installed the snap:

 sudo snap install atom --classic

then I ran atom:

atom

or atom&

When I tried to open a project the window closed with no error message or other explanation. When I checked the system log I found:

2024-07-07T19:47:25.540072-04:00 jcobban-OptiPlex-9020 systemd[2609]: snap.atom.atom-9c7a3978-ae6b-4e71-a7c6-7e6a89cb552b.scope: Consumed 7.591s CPU time.

Which I interpret as an indication that the snap went into a continuous loop and was terminated by the system.

I cannot find any indication of where I am supposed to obtain a working version of Atom or an plug-compatible open code version of an Atom replacement that runs on Ubuntu24.04. There are a whole bunch of products that are promoting themselves to the Atom marketplace, but none of them are convincingly a replacement for Atom.

Notepad++ (2,343)4.6 out of 5.
Visual Studio Code. (2,298)4.7 out of 5.
Sublime Text. (1,737)4.5 out of 5.
UltraEdit. (1,120)4.7 out of 5.
Brackets. (255)4.4 out of 5.
TextPad. (142)4.4 out of 5.
GNU Emacs. (82)4.5 out of 5.
gedit. (76)4.0 out of 5.

… is unacceptable especially since many of these have radically different user interfaces.

never mind the statement at alternativeto.net “There are more than 100 alternatives to Atom”! That site is clearly PAID FOR BY VISUAL STUDIO!

Or how about this advertisement for Zed " I would guess zed will be as good as atom about a year after it is released." and “Zed will not be open source, so not an alternative to Atom.” at github

happyaddons still lists Atom as one of its favourite editors in a page dated 15 March 2024, more than 2 YEARS after GitHub dropped support. And tecmint recommends it on a page dated 3 Jan 2024, again over 2 YEARS after the editor was killed.

So what are happy users of Atom supposed to do now that Atom is clearly NOT supported on perhaps the most popular version of Linux on the market?

Although personally I use GVIM I appreciate that it has an idiosyncratic GUI and therefore I do not want to recommend it to new programmers who need something that behaves like a basic system-independent text editor with, for example, Ctrl-C copy and Ctrl-V paste and a modern menu, but with features such as language specific colour-coding and the ability to hide code blocks or the inner text of HTML tags.

2

As of alternative to Atom, try Pulsar. It’s direct descendant of Atom. It’s not yet packaged as snap AFAIK, but useable. As of issues with atom snap, it’s best to run it using snappy-debug command.

3

Hi there -

Since Atom is no longer receiving maintenance or security fixes from upstream and is officially sunsetted by GitHub, we - the Snapcrafters community team - are going to remove Atom from the Snap Store. IIRC Atom is already unlisted so it won’t come up in snap search results.

We will look into potentially snapping Pulsar since it is an actively maintained community-fork of Atom.

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4

Thank you for being pro-active. I appreciate that most of the responsibility for creating a SNAP of a product lies with the development team for that product, not with Canonical Snapcraft.

2 Likes
5

Thank you for your advice.

1 Like
6

Snapcrafters is a community, not endorsed by Canonical :upside_down_face:

1 Like