Snaps were a mistake.
There, I said it.
Snaps wasn't and isn't needed from day 1
Canonical needs it to monetize Ubuntu.
The users? They don't
they are needed, linux need universals package manager, building for every single distro is a waste of time
Linux needed a universal package manager and it got three. Snap is not needed.
A bit of history. The first universal packaging format was snap by Canonical and used to be called Click apps and it was made for the Ubuntu mobile OS and later to the Ubuntu desktop. Red Hat in response to that created the FlatPak format. The AppImages are community effort.
AppImages long predate Snaps, but yes, Snaps do predate Flatpaks by a few months. There's also Nix packages, which predate all three. Of course, this all matters very little compared to the merits of all four technologies. The heavy dependence on proprietary technology for repositories makes Snap clearly unsuitable to become the universal Linux package format.
I don't think that matters at this point. Flatpak is widespread and Canonical can't possibly expect the linux crowd to choose the proprietary alternative. I could see snap being the one, had they just handled it differently.
true, appimage is not exactly a package manager, so we have flatpaks so win in the end btw supporting flatpak and snap is 10x easir than old .rpm .deb and support more distros
Disabling a systemd service won't prevent it from starting. For example, if another service depends on it then it will start anyway.
You have to mask the service which redirects the service files to
/dev/null
so that the service effectively has zero directives.systemctl mask --now snapd
It also means that anything which depends on snapd will likely fail. That is absolutely an improvement since we obviously don't want anything that depends on snaps.
What’s wrong with just removing snap? When ever I am forced to install Ubuntu I will remove snap and the “advantage-tools” (the part trying to sell you support)
First I’ll
snap remove —purge
all snap packages Thenapt purge —auotoremove snapd ubuntu-advantage-tools
Leaves behind a bunch of stuff. You have to manually remove each Snap individually, plus the snapshots they take and then hide, and then use Snap to remove itself (it doesn't let you), then you can apt purge snapd.
There's several levels of "we know better than you so we'll just keep this here for when you inevitably change your mind" and it is exhausting.
I don't even know if the above would also clean up all the dev/loop cruft. It was an unpleasant surprise to discover that apt remove alone didn't at least disable all the systemd .mount units.
There’s like one directory left after my uninstall - I don’t do this by hand though so I’ll have to look up the playbook.
My first line was the snap remove
Might need an
autoremove —purge
at the end to clean up.