How to Stop the Ubuntu ‘Snapd’ Service from Mounting Loop Devices

Why Does Snapd Mount So Many Loop Devices?

If you run the lsblk or df -h command in an Ubuntu terminal, you might be shocked to see dozens of “loop” devices listed, completely cluttering your output and making it incredibly difficult to find your actual physical hard drives.

This happens because Ubuntu’s default package manager, Snap (managed by the snapd service), mounts every single installed application as a read-only compressed squashfs filesystem. If you have 15 snap apps installed, you will have 15 virtual loop devices mounted at all times. If you do not use Snap packages and rely entirely on traditional APT packages or Flatpaks, you can remove snapd to clean up your system mounts.

How to Remove Snapd and Unmount the Loop Devices

The only way to stop the loop mounts is to completely remove the Snap daemon from your Ubuntu installation. (Note: This will uninstall all Snap applications, including the default Firefox browser on newer Ubuntu versions. Ensure you have alternative APT or Flatpak versions installed first).

1. Open your Ubuntu Terminal (shortcut: Ctrl + Alt + T).
2. First, list all installed snap packages:

snap list

3. You must remove every package listed, one by one, starting with the apps and ending with the core/bare packages. For example:

sudo snap remove firefox
sudo snap remove snap-store
sudo snap remove core20
sudo snap remove bare

4. Once all snaps are removed, stop and disable the snapd service:

sudo systemctl stop snapd
sudo systemctl disable snapd

5. Finally, purge the snapd package from the system entirely using APT:

sudo apt purge snapd

Run lsblk again. Your output will be instantly clean, showing only your actual physical drives and partitions, free from the clutter of virtual squashfs loop mounts.