Oh Snap!

[claydoh]

OK I'm getting very confused. Based on what I'm reading I qualify as a newbie. I'm sure y'all know what you're talking about but it makes me too nervous to try. Maybe I'm expecting too much, but will there be a solution for a "newbie" that hates Snap's hold on Kubuntu (or maybe just Firefox)? I'm patient.
Very interesting reading, thanks.

The first page in this thread has a link to instructions on how to de-snap.
There are many such how-tos
That is pretty much as newbie-friendly as it can get, really.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
I suspect that the binary version, installed to /opt and started through /usr/local/bin, will avoid some problems during a release upgrade. Having purged snapd and having no /snap, will a release upgrade reinstall them?

Well, I have discovered some (minor) problems during a release-upgrade indeed, if the user has installed Firefox from the Mozilla Team PPA - due to Ubuntu's Firefox "dummy" packages that install the Snap, .
I am currently testing several things/scenarios and working around those "problems" in my scripts - my present solution is to automatically remove the Mozilla Team version of Firefox before a release-upgrade and automatically re-install it after the release-upgrade when the user gets rid of Snap again.
I am not doing this carelessly (is this the correct word?) - 3 to 4 conditions will have to be fulfilled before a user's Firefox from the MT PPA is removed. Let's see if there is another way, but I doubt it. At least the Firefox user data is left untouched…

[Schwarzer Kater]

For anybody who might be interested:
The three scripts are in "release canditate status" and one or two nice people who have the luxury of some spare time are currently reviewing them.
I think I will be able to post them in this forum during the next two or three days.

[Schwarzer Kater]

With a little help I was able to post the three scripts.

You can find them here: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...ding-scripting
or
here on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/scripts94

[Brickfoot]

Thanks, I've read the tutorial but the continued thread here gives me the impression that I should wait for y'all to come to some final solution. I'll check in again soon.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no (and very probably will never be a) "final" solution for Ubuntu and its Flavors until Ubuntu "changes course".

Ubuntu decided to force Snap on the users (which can be useful for servers in many cases -AppArmor aside -, but is not a good decision for desktop installations in my opinion).
Therefore all Flavors (like Kubuntu) have to follow this decision too, and
either
1. one can live with it
or
2. one can remove Snap manually or with a script (this is Linux after all!)
or
3. one can "jump ship" and use openSUSE KDE, TUXEDO OS, MXLinux KDE, Fedora KDE, KDE neon (which however has snapd but no Snaps installed), Debian, Arch, Slackware, … instead.

[jfabernathy]

I found this discussion while searching in frustration how to get rid of Snap on my Kubuntu system. So I now have used Schwarzer Kater script on 2 systems; one a fresh install and the other running for more than a year. So far so good. But I am bothered by the fact that to upgrade to a new release of Kubuntu I have to reinstall Snap and then upgrade.

So I'm looking at what I want to do.

If I really want to stay on KDE, hate Snaps, require BTRFS, and need a little stability, then what do I do? Well

I can stay with Kubuntu and fight with snap every release. BTRFS subvolumes meet minimum requirements for me in Kubuntu.
I can install Debian 12 ( the release candidates are out) with the KDE DE which is 5.27 just like Kubuntu. But over the next year it will fall behind. BTRFS install here is a real pain.
I can install Fedora 38 but in a test install I found issue that shouldn't be happening. gnome-mahjongg even fails to run on Fedora, not that it's a critical app. BTRFS here is default.
I can install Endeavour OS with KDE. It's a great solution for staying current, but you better be doing btrfs snapshots a lot to recover from bad updates. BTRFS here is an easy install choice.

I'm sure there are other solutions, but I have not found an ideal one for me. I keep half a dozen VMs with things I'm testing running all the time.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
So far so good. But I am bothered by the fact that to upgrade to a new release of Kubuntu I have to reinstall Snap and then upgrade.

So I'm looking at what I want to do.
[…]

Glad the scripts were of use to you.

If you use the scripts there should be no problem at all when the time for a release-upgrade comes.
Sure: you will have to reinstall Snap before the release-upgrade and then remove it again after the relase-upgrade. But the scripts make this endeavour quite painless.
So far I have tested release-upgrading with the scripts from Kubuntu 20.04 up to 23.04 several dozen times without any problems, both in virtual machines and on physical hardware. And not only for myself, but also for friends and (some) customers who use Kubuntu (on ext4 not btrfs to be precise).

I will keep using Kubuntu (LTS) until Canonical makes it impossible to remove Snap.

I don't want you to quit using Kubuntu, but another alternative for you could be openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Quirky at times and other "special" things than on Kubuntu one has to take care of (e.g. blocking the PIM suite during installation and blocking the akonadi server stuff if one does not want to use this part of KDE, or enabling the Packman (Essentials) repository to get multimedia codecs - to name just two).
If you like rolling releases and want to be "leading" edge (not "bleeding" edge like Arch) openSUSE Tumbleweed is the best KDE Plasma experience out there IMHO. For me it has been the most stable rolling release I have used in the last decade (sometimes I had an issue with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and a kernel update, but I could roll back due to btrfs and snapper snapshots and they always fixed the problem within 2-5 days).
Many of SUSE's employees work on kernel and KDE upstream stuff and openSUSE does benefit from this (btw: SUSE has more than double the number of Canonical's employees).

[jfabernathy]

Schwarzer Kater thanks for the information on Tumbleweed. Sounds like it's worth a look so I'll spin up a VM. Another direction I'm toying with is Linux Mint. I have it on my wife's desktop PC and our laptop. She likes the Cinnamon desktop and since she either uses the desktop PC at home or laptop when traveling, it helps that the interface is the same. It's also a plus that the Linux Mint team owns Cinnamon and now Timeshift. Since it's based on Ubuntu, but no snapd, I can use all the same PPA's I use now. I also like that they have a fallback position using just Debian with the Linux Mint Debian Edition. I can't really tell which I'm on until I list the version numbers.

Lots of things to test out. My internal alarm clock goes off every six months to say "Time to change the Distro"

[maximus]

• K, so I'm here by happenstance due to other issues having caused me to notice (after a long absence from the web) what I believe to be Firefox being loaded during the boot sequence and having "Discovered" the Snap folder containg Firefox...
• fwiw I long ago abandoned mozilla due to their interest in studying my online presence (and the enforced persistance thereof by various means.. about:config I do not have the time) only to now find this?

What can one expect from a repo with a shopping bag for an icon.
"Consume everything" so says Lubuntu
I, for one, am not buying it.
in fact this evermore so is an exercise in excising the marketing dept.

[jlittle]

fwiw I long ago abandoned mozilla due to their interest in studying my online presence...

Surely the alternatives are worse? (Except for browsers like librefox that are based on firefox.)

[Snowhog]

Absolute privacy (in our modern world) is a myth, unless you want to completely remove oneself from the world. No electronic devices. Don't reside anywhere even remotely near people. Never come in contact with people. Forever.

We live in society. Certain standards of privacy are expected/respected (or should be). But absolute privacy, again, is a myth. Just my opinion.

[jglen490]

De-Snapping is relatively painless, and it works. At least it works until one installs a new version of *buntu. Even then, de-Snapping is still relatively painless.

As long as Canonical insists on pushing Snap with each new version, it will ever be thus. I just follow the original de-Snap instructions, and then install the Mozilla PPA, and all is well.

Should Canonical start to push more Snap software on an install, then reconsidering *buntu may be a decision, and a painful one. For now, it's only an every two year pain point - so no big deal.

[GreyGeek]

It became obvious, to me anyway, that Ubuntu would continue to make snap increasingly central to their release, dragging Kubuntu along with it.
I decided to move and chose Debian 12 + Plasma desktop + BTRFS - snap shortly after it was released on June 10th.

On a lark I decided to try flatpak by enabling it from Discover. I had over two dozen flatpak packages installed. In effect, flatpak replaced dpkg. To add, list or remove a package installed with flatpak one has to use flatpak. I began to notice my system not being as fast as it used to be. Boot ups took 20-25 secs. Applications installed with flatpak were slower to load and had more frequent misbehavings. My principle app is Firefox because I do a lot of Internet searching for dev tools, science tools, etc. I used to be able to click on a link in an email and it would open in FireFox. Not any more. Firefox would open but was entirely dead. That was the last straw. I used flatpak to remove firefox and then installed the esr version from the repository using muon. It worked perfectly and was much faster. That's when I decided to lobotomize flatpak. I removed every app installed with flatpak and then I removed flatpak. I replaced all the flatpak apps with the same or similar apps using muon or dpkg. With my sanitized system I rebooted. My systemd-analyze times are 10-12 seconds and everything is much snappier.

So I am now snap and flatpak free and with a quicker system. I also removed Steam, but that's a story for another thread.

[maximus]

It became obvious, to me anyway, that Ubuntu would continue to make snap increasingly central to their release, dragging Kubuntu along with it.
I decided to move and chose Debian 12 + Plasma desktop + BTRFS - snap shortly after it was released on June 10th.

On a lark I decided to try flatpak by enabling it from Discover. I had over two dozen flatpak packages installed. ~edit~ With my sanitized system I rebooted. My systemd-analyze times are 10-12 seconds and everything is much snappier.

So I am now snap and flatpak free and with a quicker system. I also removed Steam, but that's a story for another thread.

Bloatware expands to occupy the processing power made available to it.

I know I'm going to regret this post.