37

I'm currently using a Ubuntu 20.04 machine with a small root volume. The default snap setup occupies ~1G space, though with only a few packages. And when I tried to remove core from snap I got the following error.

# snap remove core18
error: cannot remove "core18": snap "core18" is not removable: snap is being used by snaps gnome-3-34-1804, gtk-common-themes and snap-store.

I understand I can work around the issue by manually remove the dependants first, but is there a one-liner solution that manages the dependencies automatically so that all snaps and snapd can be removed in one go?

wlnirvana
  • 674

2 Answers2

36

A one-liner this is not but, if you would like to completely remove everything related to snaps on your machine, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Terminal

  2. List all the snaps installed on your system with snap list. You will see something like this:

    Name                  Version                     Rev    Tracking         Publisher         Notes
chromium              87.0.4280.141               1444   latest/stable    canonical✓        -
core                  16-2.48.2                   10583  latest/stable    canonical✓        core
core18                20201210                    1944   latest/stable    canonical✓        base
emote                 1.3.0                       12     latest/stable    tom-james-watson  -
gnome-3-28-1804       3.28.0-19-g98f9e67.98f9e67  145    latest/stable    canonical✓        -
gnome-3-34-1804       0+git.3556cb3               66     latest/stable    canonical✓        -
gnome-system-monitor  3.36.0-12-g35f88a56d7       148    latest/stable/…  canonical✓        -
gtk-common-themes     0.1-50-gf7627e4             1514   latest/stable/…  canonical✓        -
snap-store            3.38.0-59-g494f078          518    latest/stable/…  canonical✓        -
spotify               1.1.46.916.g416cacf1        43     latest/stable    spotify✓          -
vlc                   3.0.11                      1700   latest/stable    videolan✓         -

  3. Remove each snap that you may have chosen to install using sudo snap remove <package>:

    sudo snap remove chromium
sudo snap remove emote
sudo snap remove spotify
sudo snap remove vlc

  4. Remove the core snaps in this order (your list may be slightly different):

    sudo snap remove snap-store
sudo snap remove gtk-common-themes
sudo snap remove gnome-system-monitor
sudo snap remove gnome-3-34-1804
sudo snap remove gnome-3-28-1804
sudo snap remove core18
sudo snap remove snapd

  5. Verify there are no more snaps installed with snap list. You should see a message like this:

    No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.

  6. Unmount the snap mount points with sudo umount /snap/core/{point}, replacing {point} with the actual mount point. You can find the complete list using df -h.

    Note: In Ubuntu 20.10 (and newer) you only need to do this: sudo umount /var/snap.

  7. Remove snapd from your system with sudo apt purge snapd

  8. Remove any snap-related directories that might remain:

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

Your system will now be devoid of snaps.

BeastOfCaerbannog
  • 16,703
15

You can run:

sudo snap remove $(snap list | awk '!/^Name|^core|^snapd/ {print $1}')
sudo apt purge snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap

Or in one line:

sudo snap remove $(snap list | awk '!/^Name|^core|^snapd/ {print $1}') && sudo apt purge snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap

I should add that removing snapd and gnome-software-plugin-snap1 remove also ubuntu-software, the Ubuntu software store. This can be fixed by running

sudo apt install gnome-software

however the icons do not all come back...

Thermostat
  • 126
Charles Green
  • 21,859