This is the source for the snap packaging of the Raspberry Pi Imager. Please feel free to open issues that you encounter with the imager (when installed from a snap) in this repository.
The Imager can be installed from the snap store like so:
sudo snap install rpi-imager
Updates will be performed automatically. The Imager can be removed with the following command:
sudo snap remove rpi-imager
The sandboxing means that the Imager can't tell which storage is genuinely removable. Be aware that, when running on certain platforms (e.g. a Raspberry Pi, or my little laptop which has eMMC storage), your boot device may appear as a flash target under "CHOOSE STORAGE" (alongside the device you wish to flash to).
It may be possible to fix this in future, but for the time being: choose carefully!
There was an issue with the customization of the first-run (or cloud-init) configuration. This has now been resolved with the addition of a couple of new auto-connections for the interfaces required, but I do not know if this will fix the issue for existing installations (I would hope it would, but it may not occur until the snaps are refreshed).
If you encounter Error creating firstrun.sh on FAT partition (or something
similar; I would imagine user-data would be mentioned in the case of an image
that supported cloud-init), please try the following to see if it resolves
things before opening an issue:
sudo snap connect rpi-imager:mount-observe
sudo snap connect rpi-imager:removable-media
I have made some efforts to update the UI integration of the snap, so the fonts should now appear at the correct size, the cursor should be the native one, and the native GTK-3 open dialog should be used in the case of selecting a custom image. I would be interested to hear of any issues in the area of UI integration.
As the Imager is based on the Qt5 UI framework, and snap's support for Qt5 (on
architectures other than amd64) is …
complicated,
the size of the snap is necessarily huge (because it's bundling much of Qt5).
This also means its start-up time is less than stellar; sorry about that.