Uninstall Snap

Snap takes care of package installation, distribution and removal of software on Linux distributions, just like “apt”. In fact, Snap is a suggested better alternative to apt. It has been touted by Canonical and Ubuntu as the best package management and installation repository on Linux. To be fair, it does have a few advantages. For example:

• Snap packages are updated automatically
• Dependencies are bundled within the snap package. So, no additional installation
• Snap applications work within a sandbox environment
• Most popular applications from major vendors such as KDE, Microsoft, Google are in the Snap repository

Problems with Snap

The Linux community has been discussing Canonical’s push for Snap and the problems associated with it. This whole Snap debate has flared up again after the launch of Ubuntu 20.04.

The latest Ubuntu variant ships with an empty Chromium package. This empty package acts as a backdoor without your consent by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. In simple terms, when you run a simple “sudo apt install chromium-browser”, it runs the command and installs the snap package instead of the Debian package. More importantly, without your consent.

It clearly fetches the snap package if the command is for an apt package.

Also, there are a lot of basic problems with snap. Snap packages take a long time to install and even start. In addition, snap packages take up a lot more space, don’t match your Ubuntu theme, and aren’t always official. In case you want to avoid this whole Snap thing, a good option would be to remove the Snap repository completely from Ubuntu, and here’s how to do that. How to remove Snap from Ubuntu

Step 1: Check for installed Snap packages.

Before we start removing Snap, you need to check if you have Snap packages installed in your system. To check if snap packages are installed, run the following command.

snap list

Step 2: Remove installed snap packages

If you get an output like above, you can proceed. If you find any installed packages under the snap list, you need to remove them using the following command.

sudo snap remove --purge package-name

“package-name” must be removed with the actual installed package name. We also have a detailed guide on how to uninstall applications on Ubuntu.

First we need to clear the snap cache.

sudo rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/

Step 3: Uninstall snap (and the snap GUI tool)

After this, we can remove both the snap package and the snap GNOME plugin. To do this, run the following command.

sudo apt autoremove --purge snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap

Step 4: Delete snap settings

Next, we can delete the snap settings and preferences from your home directory

rm -rf ~/snap

These commands will remove the snap repository from your machine and even from the Ubuntu Software Center. From now on, you will no longer have snap package recommendations or suggestions. In turn, if you try to install the Chromium browser, Ubuntu would now prompt you to download snap as a package dependency. snap-package-dependency-for-chromium

Step 5: Put snap on hold

After we have uninstalled snap and all its preferences, you can put the snap package on hold. Putting a package on hold prevents it from being installed or updated automatically. Just in case, like with Chromium.

sudo apt-mark hold snapd

Final words

So it would be better if you downloaded Chromium from the Debian repo. This would prevent the Chromium browser from updating automatically, but you would certainly be protected from Snap. If you have any further problems or questions, let me know.