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  • Would it be possible to get rid of snap from solus?

The privacy issues with snap are one thing, but there's a more critical issue with snaps.

They're not exactly on top of keeping the software available in the database up to date.

For example: a while ago I was running zoom from snap, it functioned fine. I later discovered that the version provided by the snap database had a known, widely publicized, critical vulnerability. A version where the issue had been fixed was not available in the snap database.

Now, I managed to get the recent version of zoom from flatpak, but I'd expect better from the snap database's manager of the app in regards of a such a popular communication application.

This has been going on for a while already, and I find this irresponsible. Please stop supporting snaps, it has become a security issue. People could install out of date, vulnerable versions of software from the snap store. Better to drop support for it altogether.

you can uninstall it any with sudo eopkg rm snapd

Users are free to uninstall snap from their systems, if they so choose. I don't think we should restrict their ability to install them in general, especially with Canonical still pushing hard for that ecosystem, and some apps only available as snaps (though thankfully a growing number of them also support flatpak). I'm sure there are also a number of flatpak apps with outdated version and open vulnerabilities, but I won't consider removing flatpak either. It's hard to keep a big repository all up-to-date and free of vulnerabilities. This is also true for our native .eopkg repository

    Staudey @Girtablulu

    isn't snapd built into solus's core?

    I always thought it was dangerous to get rid of? or is snapd and snap different? all I know for certain is I have the wrong assumption about something🙂

        Staudey I'm sure there are also a number of flatpak apps with outdated version and open vulnerabilities, but I won't consider removing flatpak either.

        Flatpaks are usually an application within a wrapper, set up to update automatically from the application's repository as the application updates. That's been my experience with Edge, GnomeBoxes and Zoom Flatpaks, anyway. When I see Edge or Zoom update on my Windows computers, I run "flatpak update" on Solus and the Flatpak updates.

          That is precisely what I hate about snaps, for me that section should look more clean with only drives and not apps related things.

          Staudey Users are free to uninstall snap from their systems, if they so choose

          And I agree with you, I'm sure there are a lot of people using snaps for daily use.

              brent Oh no you can definitely uninstall snapd without any issues. I also did so for quite some time (until I had to test some snap-related functionality on bare metal again ^^)

                  Staudey OK, thank you. Just curious---what would those dev/loop pictures above look like with Snap removed? Would they all be 0% with 0 bytes?

                      brent it wouldn't be shown at all, these loop are single snapd packages which where installed

                          in my machine, if I don't uninstall those snaps with snapd they will remain wen I unistall snapd form solus, that is my experience though.

                          Girtablulu thank you. I do remember the devs in the past would be very gloom-n-doom about removing this piece of infrastructure. no more I suppose. I only use Flatpaks so no horse in this race

                              This is what I use for Ubuntu based distros and Gnome. I assume Solus would be similar:
                              snap list
                              sudo snap remove --purge package-name (i.e. The specific package one at a time from the list)
                              sudo rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/
                              sudo apt autoremove --purge snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap
                              rm -fr ~/snap
                              sudo apt-mark hold snapd

                              Perhaps someone more familiar with Solus commands can adapt this.
                              P.S. I do use the fwupd snap so I haven't figured out how to do this on Solus.