The Resource-Hungry Background Daemon
Ubuntu ships with Snap support via the snapd daemon, which manages Snap packages — a universal application packaging format maintained by Canonical. Even if you never intentionally install a single Snap application, the snapd service runs automatically in the background from the moment your system boots. It periodically checks for updates to any installed Snaps (including the Snap Store itself, which is pre-installed), consumes RAM, and creates loop-mounted squashfs devices that clutter the output of commands like df and lsblk. For users who exclusively use APT and Flatpak for their software, the snapd daemon is an unnecessary drain on system resources.
Disabling the Snapd Service
To stop Ubuntu from automatically starting the Snap daemon at boot and running it in the background, you must disable the systemd service and optionally remove the Snap infrastructure entirely.
Open a terminal window (Ctrl + Alt + T). First, stop the currently running snapd service: sudo systemctl stop snapd.service. Then disable it from starting at boot: sudo systemctl disable snapd.service. You should also disable the snapd socket and the snap seeding service to prevent them from re-triggering the daemon: sudo systemctl disable snapd.socket and sudo systemctl disable snapd.seeding.service. To mask the services entirely (preventing any other process from starting them): sudo systemctl mask snapd.service. If you want to remove Snap completely, first uninstall all installed Snap packages by listing them with snap list and removing each one with sudo snap remove <package-name>. Then remove the daemon itself with sudo apt purge snapd. Finally, clean up residual directories with sudo rm -rf /snap /var/snap /var/lib/snapd ~/snap.