My experience installing Spotify with snapd under Debian 9

Hello forum!

I am new on the forum and I created this account to share my experience with snaps under Debian, I think there is potential of having a seamless, cross platform, and secure environment to distribute software in GNU/Linux.

Normally installing Spotify in Debian 9 needs the installation of a library from Debian 8, libssl1.0.0 to be precise, which is something to be avoid if you don’t want to break Debian (https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian). However snaps offer a really nice path to get Spotify under Debian without installing stuff from other releases.

I installed snapd

sudo apt install snapd

and then

sudo snap install spotify

A little bit of waiting and the process was complete, however no I con appeared in GNOME Shell to launch Spotify nor it appeared after restaring GNOME Shell using Alt+F2. To be able to see Spotify’s launcher I had to reboot my computer, which is not really that good nor is clear, for a moment I thought that the installation did not work.

After restarting my computer I was able to see Spotify’s launcher in GNOME, and it runs, awesome! however a couple of things called my attention.

Spotify’s icon does not scale with the rest and spotify does not use my Adwaita cursor theme and falls back to the old xorg default one. For some reason it does not play along with the rest of the system.

Also, another thing that I think that could be improved is that it creates a folder “snap” in my home folder, this could confuse new users that don’t really know what should be inside. I think this folder should be hidden by default to avoid cluttering the user home folder.

So far really good, and other than some minimal details I am really satisfied with the result.

Cheers!

1 Like

while this is indeed true, adding a foreign repo to your sources.list means that you give the owner of this repo 100% root access to your system…

it is a matter of trust if you want to add some random PPA or something like repository.spotify.com to your sources.list …

snap packages on the other hand have very limited access to system resources and are confined through snap interfaces so that they can do no harm to your system, this is one of the reasons snaps do exist … you dont give some random third-party full root access to your OS