How to Remove Snap in Ubuntu

Snap is a popular software package management system used by Ubuntu & Debian systems, like APT (Advanced Packaging Tool). It contains software packages as well as their dependencies. But it can take up a lot of disk space on your Ubuntu system. Many users and system administrators prefer removing snap package manager from their system, and use APT instead. This is because they can be slow at times and have security issues. It allows developers to publish software without any monitoring. In this article, we will look at how to remove Snap from Ubuntu/Debian systems.

How to Remove Snap in Ubuntu

While Snap is a promising alternative to APT, users have reported to experience performance and security issues from time to time. This has prompted many of them to drop snap from their system. Here are the steps to remove snap package manager from your system.

1. Get List of Snap Packages

Open terminal and run the following command to list all snap packages installed on your system.

$ snap list

This will show you a list of all the snap packages installed on your system.

2. Remove Snap Packages

Run the following command to remove all the snap packages from your system.

$ sudo snap remove snap-store
$ sudo snap remove gtk-common-theme
$ sudo snap remove gnome-3-34-1804

Please ensure to run the above commands in the same order as mentioned here.

3. Unmount Snap Core Services

Run the following command to unmount snap core services. Replace <core-id> with the core id of your Ubuntu system. You can obtain this information by running df command.

$ sudo umount /snap/core/<core-id>

Here is an example of core id obtained using df command.

$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            1016364       0   1016364   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0         25600   25600         0 100% /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/4046
/dev/loop2        101760  101760         0 100% /snap/core/11606
/dev/loop3        101888  101888         0 100% /snap/core/11420
/dev/loop1         56832   56832         0 100% /snap/core18/2074
/dev/loop4         34176   34176         0 100% /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/3552
/dev/loop5         56832   56832         0 100% /snap/core18/2128
tmpfs             203272       0    203272   0% /run/user/1000

If you are using Ubuntu 20.04 just run the following command.

$ sudo umount /var/snap

4. Remove Snapd

Run the following command to remove snapd and its services.

$ sudo apt purge snapd

5. Remove Associated Folders

Finally, run the following command to delete the folders associated with snap.

$ sudo rm -rf ~/snap /snap /var/snap /var/lib/snapd

You may verify the removal by running the following command.

$ snap –version

That’s it. In this article, we have learnt how to remove snap package manager from Ubuntu/Debian system.

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