This was an April Fool's Day joke, but not everything about it was a lie! Check this post for more and let us know what you think.

This announcement is also available in Spanish and Taiwanese Mandarin.

We are excited to announce today that our team of contributors has decided to gradually fade out the traditional repository system and start introducing in carefully designed steps all our applications as snaps. Snaps are specially crafted bundles of applications which also include libraries they depend upon. This means Pacman and Octopi will soon not be needed for installing your favourite applications as they will be just a click away. At the same time, our packagers will have less work to do so they will have more time to enjoy their favorite Steam games on Chakra.

Those of you that have been following Chakra through its 10 years history are aware that we were pioneers in experimenting with new technologies and implementations. We were among the first to ship modular KDE packages, support a single desktop environment and toolkit and of course release our packages in the unique half-rolling model which we continue to improve so we can offer the best experience to our users.


Another innovation we introduced several years ago were bundles. It was a way to ship and easily manage Gtk+ based applications on a system that was focused exclusively on KDE and Qt. We utilized a simple click-to-install GUI method that also made removing packages easy, maintaining your system clean of unneeded dependencies. However the technology available back then was still not mature, so integrating bundles with the rest of the system was always a problem and we unfortunately had to drop it after a while.

Yet much time has passed since then. New exciting solutions have emerged like snap and flatpak packages, backed by major companies and distributions. We have been considering and testing these technologies for exactly a year now, taking into consideration their advantages and disadvantages. As it was with bundles, snap packages make installing applications very easy. You simply download the package from the developer's website or a repository like uappexplorer, click on it and you are done!

We hope our users support this change and enjoy a new way of managing applications that we believe is the future.