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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

Just don't use snap. No need to throw out the baby woth the bathwater.

Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.

"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.

> Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.

With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?

On 25.10, removing snap gets rid of firefox, chromium, cups and many more packages.

> On 25.10, removing snap gets rid of firefox, chromium, cups and many more packages.

For servers, this may not be a problem for us. Currently on 24.04, so will have to see how things are ≥25.10.

Some server stuff is hit too! I learned about this pattern through the BGP daemon 'frr'. No idea how many server packages are/may be captured by Snap, but it's worth being aware of. Imagine my surprise. Remove it and bam, no networking.

Seems to also be available as a Debian package:

* https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=frr

in addition to a Snap:

* https://snapcraft.io/install/frr/ubuntu

Doing a quick test on 24.04: on a system without snapd installed, `apt install frr` installs packages and not any Snap stuff. Will have to see about 26.04 when I get a moment.

Thanks for digging in, as I mentioned earlier in this thread/another [lost track], I haven't messed with this in at least two LTS releases. Good to see it's aware at install time; this wasn't always the case.

How about the inverse, purging? At one point, removing Snap would lose BGP announcements [through the loss of the 'frr' software/service it was managing].

Anyway, I'm willing to believe most of my install/dependency-resolution pain was inspired by [and limited to] 18.04 or whatever was immediately after. We had a fleet of systems inadvertently moved to Snap, only learned through a loss of announcements on removal.

edit: Tested on a 24.04 box I had laying around; removing Snap does indeed still rip out things one might want:

    $ sudo apt purge snapd
    [...]
    Stopping snap.frr.ripngd.service
    Stopping unit snap.frr.ripngd.service
    [...]
    Stopping snap.frr.zebra.service

Likely fine in your case, where if memory serves, you're removing Snap in the image/provisioning stage. Cooks in busy kitchens may still be surprised, however. The real problem appears solved: 'you' get the software 'you' asked for.

> With 24.04 at least, doing an 'apt purge snapd' seems to be quite useful. Is that not sufficient?

For the moment, later pulling a package that is redirected would undo that effort. As the peer points out, too, that would likely rip out stuff you're using without having already configured preference.

One could maintain a boundless list of configs pinning repository preferences... or they could use a distribution that doesn't have a predisposition towards Snap.

Problem is most things are only snap. You can get them ocherwise but not by default

I can't believe people like Snap when in the name of security it breaks basic things such as accessing a folder on a different mount point that the user normally can access perfectly fine.

A packaging system should not break the basic abstractions of an OS.

Yeah, this was the frustrating bit to me. I use Firefox to look at stuff that lives in /tmp/, Snap Firefox can't do this. I'd remove Snap Firefox, pin the priorities and it would still silently crawl it's way back in after a week or two no matter what I tried. I gave up Ubuntu. Earlier versions used to respect the priorities but something changed.

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