Make Ubuntu Snap-less again

Ubuntu is a great distro. It's stable, popular, backed by computer makers and most importantly it's one of the most software-wise supported Linux distro.

But it's also the distro that Canonical pushes Snaps. Which is a proprietary packaging format also made by Canonical.

Snaps are actually great for servers. Even I currently run my Mastodon server as a snap.

But for desktops, snap packages tends to be slow and take a lot of storage space.

Also it's server-side is closed-sourced and people have concerns about their privacy.

They aren't the ideal packaging solution for desktop use case when compared to Flatpaks, AppImages or even native packages.

So in this post, I'm going to show you how to remove Snaps from your freshly installed Ubuntu desktop and replace it with Flatpaks. Let's get started!

1. Add Firefox PPA

Before going any further, we need to add Mozilla's official PPA to our system to prevent triggering installation of snap when we try to install Firefox.

We first need to remove the snap version of Firefox. If you're currently following this tutorial from Ubuntu, make sure to note those commands somewhere you can read before continuing.

To remove Firefox from snap run the command

sudo snap remove --purge firefox

Than we'll install Mozilla's apt repo key

wget -q https://packages.mozilla.org/apt/repo-signing-key.gpg -O- | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc > /dev/null

Getting no output from this command means it ran with no problem. Now we can add the APT repo to our sources.list file.

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc] https://packages.mozilla.org/apt mozilla main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mozilla.list

After that we need to set the Firefox package priority to ensure that package from Mozilla is always preferred. Otherwise when we try to install Firefox, it'll be installed from Snap. Which we're trying to avoid.

echo '  
Package: *  
Pin: origin packages.mozilla.org  
Pin-Priority: 1000  
  
Package: firefox*  
Pin: release o=Ubuntu  
Pin-Priority: -1' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla

Now we can install Firefox from Mozilla's repo.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install firefox

And now when you launch Firefox you can check to see it's from the Mozilla's Debian repo.

2. Removing Snap

Now we need to remove all the snaps we've installed and remove the snapd from our system.

Before removing snap, we need to stop it's systemd service.

sudo systemctl disable --now snapd && sudo systemctl disable --now snapd.socket

After that we can remove snapd from system with command below.

sudo apt purge snapd

At that point make sure to use the purge command instead of autoremove, otherwise all the mounts and stuff installed by snap will be left on our system.

3. Avoid installation of snap

As our last step, we need to add a preference file to apt to avoid installing snap. This is needed because programs like Thunderbird and Chromium-browser still triggers installation of Snap.

echo '  
Package: snapd  
Pin: a=*  
Pin-Priority: -10 ' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snap.pref

Now when we install thunderbird again from apt, we can see it installs without snapd.

4. Flatpak and Gnome Software

I personally prefer Flatpaks over Snaps because they're much better and more user friendly.

And since removing snap also removes the Ubuntu Software Center, we'll gonna replace it with the Gnome Software application.

To install Flatpak and enable Flathub, we'll use the commands below.

sudo apt install flatpak

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

After that we'll install Gnome Software with it's plugin for Flatpak

sudo apt install gnome-software gnome-software-plugin-flatpak

And we're done!

Now we can install applications from Flathub and APT repositories using Gnome Software with no need to worry about getting slow running snap packages on our system.

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Thank You!

22.02.2025