Plurrrr

Don't get me wrong, snaps are great in theory - If you aren't familiar, a snap package is like a sandboxed application that is packaged in such a way that:

• You can be sure you're running exactly what the app developer intended, as all dependencies and assets are bundled into the snap application package
• The snap application generally doesn't own your entire system, it runs in an application sandbox of sorts
• Snaps are cross-platform and distributed independently from apt/deb packages, and as such are usually more up to date than those found in apt

Now this all sounds great, and it is in some ways (especially for app developers), but it comes at a cost: and that is generally performance and annoyances with application theming, access to user folders, and the like. I personally find that if I want to run a sandboxed application I lean more toward Flatpak as it is more performant and seems a bit more mature than Canonical's snap system.

In any event, I usually disable snaps entirely on a fresh install of Ubuntu, and I'll show you how to do that in the new Ubuntu 20.04 release.

If you’ve been using Linux for any small length of time, you’ve likely used sed before. Most of the time, you’ve seen it in the form of sed "s/find/replace/g", so you simply go to it whenever there’s a replacement you want to do.

But sed stands for stream editor, and as a tool it can do more than just find and replace.

Let's talk about configuring Python applications, specifically the kind that might live in multiple environments – dev, stage, production, etc...

The tools and frameworks used in the application are not super important because the approach that I will outline below is based on vanilla Python. The impetus for this approach was caused by frustration with Django's settings, but this is my go-to for any kind of Python application I might be working on.