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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.