Adding installation advice to to the FAQ

Basement
1

Hello,

first off I just wanted to say Thank you, this looks like an amazing piece of software! I just installed it and everything is running smoothly so far.
However, speaking of installing, I’d propose to add an Installation section to the FAQ since even I as a long-term Linux user hadn’t come across Snap until now, so here’s what may help new users:

How to install Obsidian (Linux version)

The download file is not a .deb-file and can as such not be installed with apt. You will need to get Snap, another software packaging manager system. You can find out how to install and use snap here:

https://snapcraft.io/docs/getting-started

Apps that are part of the official Snap Store can be installed by typing

$ sudo snap install [program].snap

However, since Obsidian is not yet part of the official Snap Store, you will likely get the following error message:

error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap
“obsidian_0.8.14_amd64.snap”

This is because our Snap is a third-party snap, so you will have to tell snapd that you trust the Obsidian snap:

$ sudo snap install --dangerous obsidian_0.8.14_amd64.snap

This should install Obsidian 0.8.14. In order to run the program, you type

$ snap run obsidian

which should then start Obsidian.

Obviously this only reflects the problems and questions I ran into when installing the program (also a new user might end up installing dotnet-packages when searching for “how to install obsidian”…), so any additions and clarifications are welcome.

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Is there an issue with just putting the snap in the official snap store? That way we can install the snap package with snap install and also get automatic updates. Failing that, adding this to the FAQ would be great, it took me a while to find this post.

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Hey there, I also came to work out why the Snap isn’t included in the Store. I can’t see any mention of it in the Snapcraft forums either.

It appears to be using strict confinement already which is great. Is the issue that protected interfaces like home won’t auto-connect?

If the team hasn’t already, I’d suggest reaching out on Snapcraft, they’re a pretty helpful bunch and if it’s a valid use case you can get exemptions for protected interfaces.

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