
Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04 - temeritatis
https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-04/
======
jaytaylor
Kudos to the OP, I'm glad this got posted on hacker news because Snap is so
ridiculously broken.

Since 16.04, Snaps have been a huge pain for me with running LXC in production
environments.

By default, Snap applies updates and restarts Systemd services anytime it
likes, and there's no way to turn this behavior off! The only way to get
around it is to download the Snap package binary and install that directly.
Then Snap won't "know" where to get updates.

(Caveat emptor: "Workarounds" like this can easily lead to a bad security
scenario, since any critical security patches won't be installed by any
standard system update process)

Did I mention that a fair percentage of the time the Snap updates would leave
LXC in a completely broken state? In production (and development, too)!

The final nail in the coffin in this scenario comes in the form of Snap being
the official recommended way to install LXC. I don't know if Stéphane and
friends even publish Debian packages anymore.

I get the idea behind snap and appreciate it, but the lack of configurability
and no clear definition of what stable really even means . . .

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Ugh, is it _still_ impossible to disable Snap autoupdates?

Even if people should be updating regularly, forcing them feels completely
antithetical to the Linux ethos of users having control over their devices.

~~~
stefan_
The Snap team has some experience with this, seeing as how 20.04 has released
_and you still can 't move the fricking ~/snap folder_. Creating some
generically named top-level folder in the users home directory is a
straightforward _fuck you_ to all users.

Since 2017:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053)

~~~
jeroenhd
Dang, that really sucks. I was planning on updating my desktop to 20.04 but
after reading about Canonical pushing snaps and now this thread basically
claiming that moving or renaming the directory is impossible because what is
in my opinion a design flaw in the entire system design, I think I'll switch
to Manjaro or Arch for my desktop instead.

I am on the rolling releases already but I'm not going to install an LTS
version that is so deeply integrated with the distributor while at the same
time ignores the directory standards so incredible blatantly.

~~~
mcpeepants
arch is really a pleasure to use on the desktop, especially if you're already
comfortable with a rolling release distro.

~~~
jeroenhd
I agree, I'm using Manjaro on my laptop and it works like a treat. I have read
the horror stories of a botched Arch upgrade so I think I'll stick to the
slightly-more-stable Manjaro but the ecosystem itself is very nice for the
moderately familiar Linux user.

~~~
eptcyka
I develop software that tries to target as many distros as possible, and I
really don't see how Manjaro is in any way better than Arch. Botched upgrades
aside, Manjaro is the only distro that couldn't produce a valid iso to boot on
KVM/qemu. It has a very weird kernel config, sometimes users don't seem to
have modules that are found on literally any other distro. Which is very sad
because Arch just works.

~~~
jeroenhd
In my experience the Manjaro config tends to work better on some of the
hardware I've tried it on, requiring less tweaking to get it to run properly.

I'll also admit that I can't for the life of me get Arch to properly install
with all the tools and features that are normally built-in to desktop
environments to work on first boot. I'm sure I can make it work if I give it
another try now that I've gotten more used to using Manjaro, but the Arch
installation experience is not something I want to go through again any time
soon.

I understand that most Arch users will want to decide exactly how they set up
their system and all, but for my personal (non-work) machine I just want an
operating system that works, allows me to mess with the standard Linux stuff
and manages to install itself without me holding its hand. I'd much rather
tick a box that says "enable full disk encryption" than manually configure
cryptsetup and LUKS parameters. It's just too much effort for what I get out
of it.

------
coleifer
Canonical always has tried to differentiate themselves, and they just can't
execute. Remember Unity, Mir, Juju, upstart and all the other failed shit
they've come out with? Snap is just more of the same. I don't want to run that
garbage on my desktop. I don't need more daemons and forced auto-updates and
all the baggage.

I strongly recommend anyone similarly frustrated to check out debian, which is
a fantastic distro. Thanks to Kevin for posting this, but if you're using
Ubuntu and disabling snap, you're fighting against the current and I have to
imagine it's going to be increasingly difficult with subsequent releases.

~~~
robocat
> and they just can't execute

That’s a bit rich: are they not the #1 consumer distro, which hardly implies
they are failing to execute. A successful product has missteps, so what.

> I don't want to run that garbage on my desktop.

So don’t. Why complain that others do? I use Ubuntu because it works and I can
mostly find information about how to do what I want. There are major aspects
of Ubuntu I don’t like (Gnome, Snap) but selecting a distro is all about
choosing your compromises. I have tried Debian and other distros, but I tend
to go back to Ubuntu because it works best for me.

~~~
Koshkin
> _I don’t like (Gnome, Snap)_

Snaps may be a pain sometimes, but Gnome seems to be working like a charm...

~~~
RMPR
People often complain about design decisions of the GNOME team: removing
desktop icons, status bar, ...

~~~
petepete
Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons.
Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for
daring to take tough decisions for the greater good.

I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and
XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.

~~~
jason0597
There was a very good post here in Hacker News explaining why the decisions
that GNOME (and others as well) have taken are bad:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541)

~~~
petepete
Yes I saw this the other day. The post is incorrect in several ways but there
are some valid opinions in there that I agree with too.

Nothing as big as a DE is perfect, thankfully it's broadly moving in the right
direction.

------
psanford
I really like the idea of snaps. I really don't like a lot of the execution
decisions around them.

Snaps break debain's stable release model. They allow upstream to ship updates
outside of the normal 6 month ubuntu releases. There are times when you might
want this, but it should be opt in not mandatory. I thinking specifically of
lxd which is only shipped via snaps.

The snap store's trust model is confusing. Its hard to tell who is making the
packages and how they are sandboxed. If I'm going to install a proprietary
piece of software I want to know exactly what it can and can't do. Lately I've
been using firejail when I need to run things like this.

And now for a minor complaint that also feels most user hostile to me: why do
the snap developers think its ok to require a non hidden directory in $HOME?
Seriously my home directory is MINE, if you have to store application state
there at least have the decency to do it in a hidden directory.

~~~
mulmen
I don’t have any experience with snaps so this is all new to me. Snaps install
software at a system level right? Why on earth would there be _anything_ in a
user home directory? What if you have multiple users? Does snap get confused?

~~~
coolspot
Snap stores user-specific application data in /home/user/snap/ folder. Like
when packaged application wants to write into $HOME, snap gives it some sub-
folder inside /home/user/snap.

~~~
mulmen
Ah ok I understand now. Sibling comments reference the MacOS Library and *NIX
~/.local approaches. Both of those seem to make a lot more sense. Is there a
config for Snaps to store user data in a different path, like ~/.local/snap/?

~~~
jasonjayr
No; they use some magic with security policies and mounts so $HOME/snap is
hard coded. Some of the early comments in that "4 year old bug" linked here
explain it.

------
AlexMax
I wanted to like snaps (and flatpaks before then), because trying to ease
packaging and deployment of apps on Linux is a noble goal, but in both cases I
eventually gave up on non-trivial use of them because they were always broken
in some annoying way because of their sandboxing.

The latest snap I had to get rid of was Visual Studio Code, because I was
trying to work on an open source game with it, and I found out that if I
launched the game from inside Visual Studio Code, my game wouldn't play sounds
because it couldn't communicate with PulseAudio, and attempting to use ALSA
just straight up gave me an error.

On the other hand, I've only had positive experiences with AppImage. Gives you
an all-in-one image that you can directly execute if you like, and no
sandboxing nonsense.

~~~
simosx
AppImages are a disaster waiting to happen. They are like Windows MSI
installation files just downloaded from somewhere, running without any
confinement.

~~~
livre
You can run the AppImages you don't trust with the Firejail sandbox which has
native support for AppImage.

[https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/appimage-
supp...](https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/appimage-support/)

~~~
Avamander
This is a nice workaround I guess.

~~~
livre
I'd call it following the Unix philosophy instead of a workaround.

> Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather
> than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

Both AppImage and Firejail do one thing and do it well, you can easily combine
both and get what you want.

~~~
Avamander
SELinux does the job better though if someone just configures it. AppImages
should be confined automatically IMO.

------
vetinari
One more thing if you installed on ZFS:

/var/snap is a subvolume. Purging snapd wants to remove the /var/snap
directory, but it being mounted subvolume, it will fail. Purging snapd will
therefore also fail.

Destroy (-r) the /var/snap subvolume _before_ apt purge snapd.

Similarly, if using flatpak, create a new subvolume for /var/lib/flatpak
before installing the first one. You don't need to snapshot your flatpaks
together with the /.

------
Darmody
I've been using Ubuntu 20.04 for several weeks, almost since beta came out.

The snap thing is a pain in the ass. I understand the need for something like
snap or flatpak. I had software too new or too old that wouldn't work because
some dependencies were not updated or were too new. Snaps can solve that by
allowing the developers to provide everything you need (or everything you need
that is not on your system). But why would I want a snap calculator or a snap
system monitor? On 19.04 it would take a couple seconds to open the
calculator...thank god they reverted those apps as normal packages.

Now I feel like I felt on Windows when I had to be extra careful installing
software in case somethign weird came in the installer. What kind of package
is this? Is it a snap? Can I install the normal package? Is the snap provided
by someone trustworthy?

I also had to install Unity. Gnome lacks support for multiple monitors. Some
stuff like the dash working only on the main monitor breaks completely my
workflow. Almost for every action I want to make I have to change my focus to
the main monitor.

~~~
beart
multiple monitor support in Linux is high on my list of reasons I keep
switching back to my Windows partition.

~~~
Darmody
It worked very, very well on Unity. It also works with other DE like Plasma
but I personally find it horrendous on other aspects.

I'll probably give Budgie a go.

~~~
beart
If my primary monitor is to the right of my secondary monitor, do applications
open on the primary monitor or the 'left' monitor? Also, do applications
remember which monitor they were last opened on?

~~~
Darmody
That depends on the DE.

On Unity it opens on the monitor you're focusing.

Sometimes it's a bit tricky. Let's say you're focusing on a Window on your
main monitor but your mouse cursor is in the secondary monitor. If you hit the
meta key, the menu will show on the secondary monitor. Now, if you open an
application without using your mouse it'll open on your main monitor, where
you had the focused window but if you click on the app it'll open on the
secondary monitor because the click changes the focus.

Some stuff is not as polished as it should be but if we take in consideration
that Unity has been abandoned for 4 years and before that it wasn't developed
at all as all the effort was put into Unity8, I'd say it's a pretty damn good
DE.

I hated it when it came out but now I can't live without it.

------
cies
To ensure snap will not be installed again see the apt config here:

[https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-
snap](https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap)

This is needed because an every growing number op packages is "dependant" on
it.

Here I show how to install Chromium as a DEB package from Debian (on a buntu):

[https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-
setup/tree/master/chromium](https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-
setup/tree/master/chromium)

~~~
madars
Chromium is actually the only real use case for snaps. It is so difficult to
build/package chromium for a LTS distro that Debian simply stopped trying. See
what happens with security updates on Debian jessie (which is under their
LTS): [https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-
package/c...](https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-
package/chromium-browser) . Ubuntu made the right choice here:
[https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-
tra...](https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-transition)

~~~
Taniwha
Except that chromium under snaps is pretty unusable unless your home directory
is structured exactly the magic way Canonical expects, if you have symbolic
links, stuff on other disks, suddenly you can't upload your customer orders,
or your PCB CAD designs to be made, you can't save files into /tmp anymore,
even if you've been doing that for 3 decades. And it all fails silently,
mysteriously, no error messages explaining why stuff has suddenly stopped
working.

I'm not against stuff changing, but tell us up front, explain what's changed
and make sure that you're not breaking existing things or provide a way for
people to keep their existing stuff work, a flag that says that following
symbolic links is OK ... and put that UI in Chromium itself, not in some other
box somewhere

------
troyready
One of the very annoying consequences of the Chromium move to snap on 20.04 is
that it will silently fail to launch most external links (e.g. Slack, Zoom).

A workound is posted at
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1776873/comments/29](https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1776873/comments/29)
(simple patch & recompile). May be worth making a PPA for the fixed snapd if
we can't get the Canonical dev team to fix the core issue.

~~~
qppo
It basically breaks xdg-open. This is crucial for a lot of flows with desktop
software and I'm honestly baffled why it isn't fixed. Any URI with a custom
scheme is horribly and completely broken with a browser installed as a snap.
Even basic stuff like file uris are broken in browsers installed as a snap.

It's extremely weird to see this kind of thing when it happens too, you
usually trust Firefox to work!

~~~
akvadrako
It is strange this is still broken, but it’s pretty easy to build wrappers for
xdg-open and friends yourself.

I prefer the isolation of snaps so I’m willing to put a little work into it,
but understand not everyone cares to do that.

~~~
qppo
It's a problem for my users, because it's silently broken.

------
usr1106
Most of our family PCs run Xubuntu LTS. Because they are low end / 10+ year
old machines I always uninstall unnecessary stuff like snap. Have not seen a
single case where I would have regretted this.

I have been using Xubuntu 20.04 for several weeks and it has worked well.
Because that's a high end laptop I have not bothered to uninstall snap yet,
although that has been on my mind.

I am surprised that the article writes there are snaps installed by default.
Checking in Xubuntu 20.04 that's luckily not the case

    
    
       $ snap list
       No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
    

So the only somewhat worrying news is that chromium is gone.

    
    
       $ apt show chromium-browser
       Package: chromium-browser
       Version: 80.0.3987.163-0ubuntu1
       ...
       Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd
       ...
       Description: Transitional package - chromium-browser -> chromium snap
        This is a transitional dummy package. It can safely be removed.
        .
        chromium-browser is now replaced by the chromium snap.
    

Not that I would use Chromium more than 3 times a year. But occasionally some
web site is broken on Firefox. And if it is important like a flight check-in I
start chromium. But flying is not a valid use case in Europe at the moment so
lets see how long I it takes until I note the lack of chromium again.

------
djhaskin987
I installed keepassxc using a snap, but because it was in a snap browser
integration didn't work with my browser because of the snap isolation,
rendering it useless. Also it's kind of weird that hey Damon has to run just
so that I can install snaps and one Daemon per snap, too. I'm pretty sure I
don't like that.

~~~
cies
Keepass as a snap because security right /s. This is an actual piece of
software that has a history of being modded by attackers to steal credentials.
Why would you put that in a snap?

~~~
trystero
May I ask what history you're speaking of? (also note that KeepassXC is a fork
of Keepass)

~~~
cies
Any Keepass (or similar) software, it should run as predictable as possible. I
know this software was once offered with a trojan loaded on some download
website, but just searched around and could not find anything about it. Maybe
the maintainers remember.

------
benjaminjackman
So I've used ubuntu (Xubuntu, xfce) for quite a while and would rather not
deal with this, are there any distros that aim to be ubuntu but without snap?

Because hearing things like `sudo apt install chromium` actually aliases to
using snap is disconcerting to say the least if true.

~~~
Shared404
Pop!_Os is basically just Ubuntu but better. They will have flatpak
integration with the store app with 20.04, but the official stance is to use
the deb packages first, and then fall back to flatpak if there is no deb
available.

~~~
cbHXBY1D
I think Pop_Os is becoming the next Ubuntu. It's already captured a huge
percentage of the gaming community. If you read r/linux_gaming a huge amount
seem to be using it.

------
musicale
> I lean more toward Flatpak as it is more performant

What is "performant" supposed to mean here?

Is Flatpak faster than Snap? more compact? simpler? more reliable/secure?
easier to use? more efficient in terms of cpu/memory/communication/power/etc.?
all of the above?

~~~
djsumdog
I always had problems with both of them. I use Docker a lot and Flatpak/Snap
are intended to be a type of Docker for desktop apps. I know with Flatpak it
has some shims to integrate with your system UI libraries so themes try to
match up, but there are issues with that too (and flatpak apps just not
starting up half the time).

I really hate Snap/Flatpak conceptually. Use the package manager. That's what
it's there for. FPM is a way to make package building easier.

Snap/Flat tools feel like they're about the same as Electron cancer; and I bet
we'll see more closed source commercial stuff pushed to the Linux world via
them as well.

~~~
Koshkin
> _a type of Docker for desktop apps_

By the way, what is it with Docker that makes it hard or impossible for it to
be used for this exact purpose?

~~~
mixmastamyk
Docker is poorly designed as well.

~~~
appleflaxen
can you elaborate? I can google for "docker sucks" blogposts, but I trust the
HN opinion to be a bit more thoughtful. Any specific pain points you can
identify?

~~~
mixmastamyk
The most commonly mentioned flaw was/is the root daemon. That can be worked
around with other tools. The command line and docker files are a bit clumsy as
well. Many images have security flaws. It didn’t clean up after itself for a
looong time, etc.

It doesn’t “suck,” and many of the ideas are compelling. But, the design and
implementations could be better. I was interested in rkt until it was acqui-
abandoned.

------
lemagedurage
It's a shame that chromium's apt package uses snap now. Startup time increased
from ~0.2 to 5-10 seconds. Using Brave fixes this.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Switching to another browser to fix a packaging problem with the first browser
is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It's also disingenuous to suggest a browser wrapped in a cryptocurrency
promotional wallet thing as a comparable alternative.

~~~
capableweb
> Switching to another browser to fix a packaging problem with the first
> browser is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Sure, but some people just want to have their problem fixed and they only have
a sledgehammer in front of them. If it works, is it really that bad?

> a browser wrapped in a cryptocurrency promotional wallet thing

I think you have it the wrong way around. It's a browser containing an
integration with a cryptocurrency wallet, not the other way around. You'd
still be able to use it as a normal browser if you ignore the cryptocurrency
stuff.

------
emersion
It seems like on recent Ubuntu installations some packages are provided by
snaps (ie. "apt install XXX" will install a snap). I'd be interested in
disabling this behaviour, if anyone knows.

~~~
101404
That would be really bad. I used Ubuntu for the past 15 years or so, but that
would make me switch to a different distro.

So shortly after the Mir fiasco, why does Canonical feel it necessary to come
up with the next dumb idea?

~~~
shock
What is or was the Mir fiasco?

~~~
miker64
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)#Controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_\(software\)#Controversy)

------
antpls
I installed Snap on Debian 10 stable to install Firefox and Chromium as snaps.
It allows me to get the latest security updates for these 2 software without
entering into dependency hell with the OS. Beside the slow startups, which is
not really an issue with those apps because I keep them open all the time, it
worked flawlessly so far for me.

My only con is that the defaults update all snaps like every day, and I really
would like to have better control on that, because I'm always on mobile data.

~~~
kelnos
If all you're looking for is the ability to get the upstream updates
immediately, you can also just download the tarball version and unpack it
somewhere under your home directory. Then dump a .desktop file for each in
~/.local/share/applications/ so it shows up in your app menu.

No startup slowness, and you'll still get the vendor-provided updates as
they're released.

~~~
saintamh
I'm curious why this got downvoted -- would it not work?

~~~
zodmaner
I have no idea why that reply got downvoted as well. It is essentially how I
installed Firefox on my Debian stable laptop , and it has been working great
as far.

------
schmichael
Performance aside I was very disturbed to learn snap packages have no
namespacing and no useful mandatory authorship metadata:
[https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lack-of-package-provenance-
is-a...](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lack-of-package-provenance-is-a-
security-concern/16316)

tl;dr -> HashiCorp's various tools exist as snaps but none are published by
HashiCorp. All are out of date. Some have incorrect metadata. Few provide any
clue as to who or where the upstream is. There's usually not even a way to
contact the snap author to submit patches or ask for an upstream link. eg
[https://snapcraft.io/nomad](https://snapcraft.io/nomad)

~~~
ghthor
Yep, it's a massive smell. When I looked at installing a snap I wanted to
audit the build script but I couldn't find that anywhere. That's a big NO from
me.

------
zimbatm
Consider any other operating systems out there for a moment. A new upgrade
comes along that contains unwanted features. How often is it possible to
revert that by uninstalling a few packages?

There is a level of care here which I think is great. Some engineer somewhere
made sure that the system would still work without snaps. This is a very
Debian attitude which Ubuntu inherits from and which I would like to celebrate
for a bit :-)

~~~
djsumdog
Have you ever tried Void? I've used it on my routers for years, had a media PC
with it and recently setup my dedicated server with it. It's really nice, but
it is certainly more hands on and missing the management layers found in other
Linux distros.

------
smkellat
In looking at some of the other entries about 20.04 on Mr. Custer’s site I’m
wondering if it would’ve been simpler to just start with mini.iso to make an
actual barebones installation and then install only what is actually desired.
If you truly want a lean install then building your own custom mix is possible
in Ubuntu and a relatively blank slate is available.

------
lainga
Does Canonical have any 'push' motive for reducing dependence on apt? Or do
they really just like snaps?

~~~
pixelmonkey
I think they just realized it gives them a way to package proprietary apps
like Skype, Spotify, and Slack a bit more simply than would be required to
apt-ify/dpkg-ify them. I really think that's the primary motivation.

~~~
Spivak
And it's a pretty good one since the experience with having a large catalog of
useful software in Flatpaks has been awesome and largely seamless. I just wish
Canonical wasn't off doing their own thing or had started out in the open from
the start so it would have a chance of being a useful standard instead of the
weird Canonical store.

~~~
fapjacks
Considering that Flatpak was essentially a hostile fork of the AppImage
project motivated by Red Hat's insatiable hunger for control, I find it ironic
when Flatpak supporters complain about Canonical "doing their own thing".

~~~
the_why_of_y
FlatPak has nothing to do with AppImage, is in no way shape or from a fork of
it.

[https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-
history/](https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-history/)

AppImage only solves the easy part of the generic-linux-app problem, namely
running the packaged appimage; it does nothing to solve the hard parts: how do
you build the application so that it will actually run on generic Linux
distributions, and sandboxing.

------
ThrowawayR2
Interesting but it raises the question of what the effects of removing those
snap packages are? I note that he doesn't mention installing anything to
replace them, so it's probably not serious but still...

~~~
simosx
A stock installation of Ubuntu 20.04 only has very few snaps. I think the only
important one is the Snap Store/Ubuntu Software. If you can put up with the
Snap Store, you can avoid (if you really want that) installing further snap
packages.

------
oedmarap
I recently switched from Ubuntu (before 20.04's release) to Clear Linux which
has Flatpak integrated by default.

Along with the native package "bundles" (e.g. dev-tools, ruby-basic,
containers-virt, etc.) that include built-in dependencies, Flatpak/FlatHub
apps seem to work better than Snap/Snapcraft in my experience.

~~~
gtaylor
I was just reading this the other day:
[https://community.clearlinux.org/t/changes-coming-to-
clear-l...](https://community.clearlinux.org/t/changes-coming-to-clear-linux-
direction/4337)

I wonder what is about to happen to the desktop experience for Clear Linux.

------
red_admiral
I really don't get what market ubuntu is going for here.

People like me who would like a system that works their way, even if it's not
the same way as the distribution maintainers - nope. Believe it or not, I
don't want my desktop to be full of animations, I want updates to happen on my
schedule, and I care about having the active title bar a different colour to
the rest.

People who believe in Free As In Freedom - it's still technically free, but
for all practical purposes it might as well not be if you have to recompile a
core package for things like using a non-standard home directory path. This is
one of many things where I sigh and go Freedom wasnt meant to be like this.

The average non-techy user - uses windows anyway, and has access to a much
larger software ecosystem as a result.

------
pmontra
If gnome-3-34-1804 and gtk-common-themes are a snap, what happens when we
remove them? I expect to be able to install them using apt but I went to
[https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/focal/](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/focal/) and
I couldn't find them. So "a snap-free Ubuntu" seems to be a really a different
kind of Ubuntu. (Unless there are also other versions of Gnome in 20.04.)

~~~
elagost
These are resources/dependencies for other snaps. The .deb packages for Gnome
and your GTK themes stick around. You can safely remove the snaps and not see
any real noticeable difference.

------
ilaksh
The issue I had with snap was my server was going down. I thought it had run
out of disk space like the last few times, but it seemed to be out of memory.
Then I looked in htop and something related to snap or lxc was using most of
the RAM. I think this is Ubuntu 18. Don't remember what I installed that used
snap. But I had to remove snap to prevent my server from running out of memory
periodically making my program crash.

~~~
RMPR
You may have run into this bug [https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/memory-run-
memory-file-system-l...](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/memory-run-memory-file-
system-leaking-with-snap-install-remove/429)

------
KoenDG
I remember this happening: [https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/docker-
snap-18-09-9-error/14171...](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/docker-
snap-18-09-9-error/14171/2)

Not fun to think that could have happened on a production env if people didn't
disable snap.

------
simosx
Canonical distributes LXD as a snap package.

That does not forbid others to package LXD independently. Debian has been
close to packaging LXD at
[https://wiki.debian.org/LXD](https://wiki.debian.org/LXD) It is a matter of
picking up interest to complete the work.

------
ezoe
The only downside of disabling snap in Ubuntu is the Chromium. Since Ubuntu's
official package of Chromium is using snap, disabling the snap means you don't
get packaged Chromium from Canonical. You have to build it yourself or using
other means of distribution, like using Debian apt package or proprietary
Google Chrome.

It's not much of a problem for me since I believe that keeping diversity of
Web browser is necessary for the healthy Web ecosystem and I force myself to
use Firefox. And I really hate Chromium force me to waste CPU time on some
kind of test payload occasionaly, it use 100% of a core and there is no way to
disable it.

I'm fine with restricting myself to use Firefox since I'm not a Web frontend
developer so I don't need to test Chromium behaviours myself. But others may
not.

------
fapjacks
And now, in a sort of hilarious turn of events, the latest pulseaudio update
wants to install snapd (recommended by pulseaudio's new libsnapd-glib1
dependency). And of course, when someone asked about it, they just got a quiet
WONTFIX.

------
pnako
Just install Debian instead of disabling all the stupid stuff from Canonical.

------
stbtrax
What problem were snaps trying to solve?

~~~
simosx
1\. Snaps provide granular confinement to the applications. Is there a network
tool CLI that happens not to read/write local files? You can forbid access to
the filesystem, forbid access to the X server and all other resources.

2\. Is the whole packaging a pain? Just do the work once and create the
snapcraft.yaml packaging file that describes the whole process. You can even
use the snap build server to rebuild fresh snap packages (in six
architectures) as soon as you make a commit to your repository.

3\. Are you a software company that wants to distribute your software? You can
do all the snap building in-house.

4\. The same snap works in many many distributions.

------
lokedhs
To me is seems as though Snap is playing a similar part as Unity did in
Ubuntu. It's Canonical suffering from NIH.

Flatpak exists and works. The application I'm working on is distributed on
Flathub, and I don't have the time nor the interest to learn yet another
packaging system.

Ubuntu would do well trying to not just lead (which they do in some aspects,
I'm sure) but also try to follow when it's more appropriate. The push towards
Unity and now Snap just causes more fragmentation in the Linux community.

------
SkyMarshal
Does anyone else use update-alternatives to install and maintain software?
Takes a little setup work, mainly in scripting the soft links for binaries,
but once done it’s a pretty clean way of managing software installations.

[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/update-
alter...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/update-
alternatives.8.html)

------
aloknnikhil
Thanks for this. I followed the steps and it failed to unmount the current
"core" mount for snapd because the target was busy. What helped me was to
unmount it lazily by running 'sudo umount -l /snap/core/xxxx' and then purging
the package. That helped things move along. Just in case someone runs into
this issue.

------
LockAndLol
Say bye bye to Chromium on 20.04 from the default repos

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/g7cv6k/debs...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/g7cv6k/debs_installing_snaps_what_the_fresh_horror_is/)

The deb tries to install the Chromium snap package ;)

------
Tijdreiziger
So can anyone actually explain what Snaps and Flatpaks are? Why are they
good/bad? And how do they compare to each other?

~~~
RMPR
The two technologies are used to sandbox GUI apps. They were supposed to make
it possible to run newer apps on top of older libraries and to let 3rd party
editors publish their software easily towards multiple distributions, but in
practice you can face many problems (lack of system integration, apps not even
starting, ...). Flatpak allows anyone to create stores, (iirc Flathub code is
on Github) while with Snap you need to use the Snapcraft (vendor lockdown).

------
usr1106
I always uninstall snapd, too.

Inspired by this post I checked what is actually offered as a snap.

This one surprised me: [https://snapcraft.io/aws-
kernel](https://snapcraft.io/aws-kernel)

Who can explain me how I would use a kernel running as a snap?

Well, last updated 2017, so I don't think I want to try that one.

------
joshuaellinger
Very timely.

Just tried to install 20.04 on LVM. It gets in to a completely broken state if
you misconfigure the network due to an error in an exception handler in an
Python error handling view in the UI. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

------
coderesearch
Two questions:

a) is it possible to use Chromium without snaps?

b) Can anybody please describe the general experience with Centos for a media
production machine - needs to run NVIDIA GPU support, Ardour, low latency
jackd and Davinci Resolve on XFCE.

------
nikisweeting
Semi-related: does anyone know how to install microk8s via apt without snap?

~~~
simosx
Packaging and maintaining microk8s is a significant effort to do with apt. You
are asking if someone managed to do all the work to package microk8s and keep
managing it as a deb package.

~~~
nikisweeting
I don't necessarily need an "all-in-one" package, I'd be ok with a 30min
tutorial on installing all the components manually.

------
favadi
I don't understand the need to remove it, if you don't like snap, just ignore
it and don't install anything from it. There is no harm keeping them
instlaled, right?

------
dancemethis
The two snaps I had to interact with so far, dotnetCore and microk8s are
ridiculously bad. Why they have so many stupid quirks and nonlogical
interfaces are way beyond me.

------
arodyginc
You can also get snap-free Kubuntu (with a great Plazma desktop)

------
ressetera
Snaps are great for auto updating software, especially the ones from
JetBrains.

I think most users will be fine. Those of us who need more fine grained
control, can have it.

~~~
InternetOfStuff
Chromium silently moved to a snap package some weeks ago.

Annoying but harmless: it's start time has multiplied.

Workflow-breaking: Chromium now can't see my NFS mounts anymore.

It's not just about having a pretty home directory.

~~~
Avamander
Workflow-breaking: KDE integration, Estonian eID signing and GooPG plugins
don't work, also data loss when Chromium updates and you have it open

------
sgnnseven
Take note though that AppArmor breaks when removing the snapd package using
this method - at least that was the case for me about a week ago :/

------
notokay
Nice and helpful guide.

In this month only I had to give up using firefox because uglyBar and ubuntu
because of snaps.

There won't be anywhere to run soon.

~~~
mothsonasloth
You can disable the new address bar on Firefox - [https://lifehacker.com/how-
to-disable-firefox-75s-new-addres...](https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-
firefox-75s-new-address-bar-1842728031)

~~~
notokay
Not on the new nightly release anymore.

------
Pmop
Funny thing: snapd is suggested for installation when executing

    
    
      sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak

------
grizzles
Snaps < Flatpak

ufw < firewall-config

===============

I like & prefer Ubuntu. But where else is Fedora/CentOS/other distros ahead of
Ubuntu?

------
bfrog
Snap is honestly driving me away from Ubuntu. Managed systems are less
manageable with snap involved.

------
zamadatix
What happens if you just sudo apt purge snapd without the rest?

~~~
simosx
In a default installation of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, there are only very few pre-
installed snap packages. The only important one is the Snap Store, that allows
to install DEB packages and snap packages. If you can put up with the Snap
Store and only install DEB packages, then you are fine. If you remove the Snap
Store and you are at ease with 'apt', then you can may do so.

------
ausjke
been a long time Ubuntu LTS user, reading from the discussion here, I'm
seriously thinking about moving back to Debian _fully_, anybody is doing it
similarly?

------
aledthemathguy
Excuse my question, but why even Ubuntu? Isn't something like Manjaro better?

