Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04, Hacker News

Intro

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 does not 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 . (release.)

1. Remove existing Snaps

On a fresh Ubuntu install, a few snaps come preinstalled. You can see the list of them using snap list :

  kevin @ olubuntu: ~ $ snap list Name Version Rev Tracking Publisher Notes core    - 2.  (1) (1  latest / stable canonical✓ core core 18 
   
  latest / stable canonical✓ base gnome-3 - 30 -  (0)    git.2c 20200311 
  latest / stable /… canonical✓ - gtk-common-themes  0.1  - 42 - gd  (a) (a)  latest / stable /… canonical ✓ - snap-store 
   . e 20200311  
 latest / stable / ... canonical✓ -    

	

			
	

			


		
			
			
					
			
		





 To remove these, you will need them using  sudo snap remove 
 

  
 Run the following command to remove them all: 
 
  sudo snap remove snap-store sudo snap remove gtk-common-themes sudo snap remove gnome-3 - 42 -  sudo snap remove core 16 
 
 You might be wondering why I didn't remove the  core 
 snap ... well it turns out you can't remove that one but it will get removed anyway in the next steps. 

	

			
	

			


		
			
			
					
			
		




 
 2. Unmount the snap core service  
 You'll need to replace the  xxxx 

 with the actual ID inside the  core  directory on your system, which you can find out by running  df     sudo   umount  / snap / core / xxxx  
 
 3. Remove and purge the snapd package 
 
 Next, to remove the snapd package and all of its related services, run: 
    sudo   apt  purge snapd 
  
 4. Remove any lingering snap directories 
 Finally, you can remove the remaining snap directories on the system. You may not have any of these directories after step 3, and that's okay. I did not have these directories on a fresh Ubuntu  install once snapd was removed, but your mileage may vary. 
    rm  -rf ~ / snap  sudo   rm  -rf / snap  sudo   rm  -rf / var / snap  sudo   rm  -rf / var / lib / snapd 


  Enjoy a snap-free Ubuntu 

 It's that simple, now your Ubuntu  20 system is free of Snaps! 🙂