How to Completely Remove the Snap Store from Ubuntu

In recent releases, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has heavily promoted its proprietary “Snap” package format. By default, Ubuntu includes a hidden background service called snapd and heavily pushes users towards installing applications via the Snap Store rather than traditional APT repositories. While Snaps offer sandboxed security and easy updates, many advanced users dislike them due to slower application startup times, messy loopback mounts cluttering the system, and a lack of control over background updates.

If you prefer to keep your Linux installation clean and rely entirely on traditional .deb packages or Flatpaks, you can completely purge the Snap ecosystem from your Ubuntu machine using the terminal.

Removing Installed Snap Packages

Before you can remove the core Snap daemon, you must first uninstall any applications that are currently relying on it. If you try to remove snapd while a Snap application is still installed, the system will throw an error.

1. Open your terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T).
2. List all currently installed Snap packages by typing:
   snap list
3. You must remove these packages one by one. The order is important; you must remove applications first, then the core frameworks. Use the sudo snap remove command followed by the package name. For example:
   sudo snap remove firefox
sudo snap remove snap-store
sudo snap remove gnome-3-38-2004
sudo snap remove bare
sudo snap remove core20
4. Finally, remove the base snap daemon itself:
   sudo snap remove snapd

Run snap list again to confirm that the list is completely empty.

Purging the Snap Daemon

With the applications gone, you can now remove the underlying snapd software from the APT package manager and clean up the leftover directories.

1. In the terminal, run the following command to completely uninstall the daemon and its configuration files:
   sudo apt purge snapd
2. Next, remove any unused dependencies left behind:
   sudo apt autoremove
3. Finally, delete the hidden Snap directories from your home folder and the root directory to reclaim disk space:
   rm -rf ~/snap
sudo rm -rf /snap
sudo rm -rf /var/snap
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/snapd

Preventing Reinstallation

Because Canonical heavily integrates Snaps into Ubuntu, running a simple sudo apt install command for certain popular programs (like Chromium) might secretly trigger the system to reinstall snapd. To stop this from happening, you must block the package entirely using an APT preference file.

1. Create a new preference file by typing:
   sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
2. In the nano text editor, type the following three lines exactly:
   Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10
3. Press Ctrl + O and then Enter to save the file.
4. Press Ctrl + X to exit the editor.
5. Update your package list to apply the new rule:
   sudo apt update

Your Ubuntu system is now completely free of Snaps, and the package manager is explicitly instructed never to reinstall them.