Fresh install of Ubuntu has snap - here's how to remove it

[Jason]

I was surprised that Ubuntu, even with a fresh install has the snap installer built-in.. As far as I can see there are not snaps installed with it. I discovered that's not the case, see the reply to this post.

While I'm okay with these kinds of package formats generally (e.g. snaps, flatpaks and AppImages), I recently found out that snap is proprietary to Ubuntu (i.e. no one else can use it). So I removed snap from my system. Here's how to do it in Ubuntu-based distros.

[Jason]

There seems to be one issue with this tip that I just discovered but may not matter to experienced users. The Software Center disappears. I guess it was a snap. Since Ubuntu doesn't come with Synaptic by default, you'll need to either download it or the software center using the Command-Line Interface (CLI) or terminal. The commands are:

For both (updates the list of packages from the repo)

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sudo apt update


For Software Center:

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sudo apt install gnome-software


For synaptic:

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sudo apt install synaptic


I'm not sure if any other software was installed in Ubuntu as a snap.