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The snap daemon (snapd) is the defined tool for retrieving snaps and all associated metadata from Canonical’s servers. In addition, snaps have functional drawbacks that the company has been slow to eliminate. Flatpak, on the other hand, was well received by proponents of alternative package systems. Flatpak is probably the choice of most users outside the Ubuntu environment. This could eventually lead to Canonical mothballing Snap again, as has often been the case in the past with in-house developments such as Ubuntu Touch or the Mir display manager.
This situation has led some distributions to reject or even block snaps. One prominent example is Linux Mint, based on Ubuntu LTS, whose developers decided as early as 2020 not to deliver snaps. They also announced that Linux Mint, starting in version 20, would actively prevent the installation of the Snap framework via the graphical package manager, preventing snaps from automatically ending up on the user’s system through the backdoor.
Laptop manufacturers System76 (Pop!_OS) and Tuxedo (Tuxedo OS 1) also avoid shipping snaps with their Ubuntu derivatives. Even Ubuntu users have not rallied behind Snap, as suggested by many guides that describe installing Firefox in Ubuntu as a DEB.
unsnap
Former Snap co-developer Alan Pope, who left Canonical in 2021 after 10 years with the company, has developed unsnap, a script that replaces snaps with Flatpaks where available. The script, hosted on GitHub, has been tested by the developers for use on Ubuntu and all derivatives that offer snapd and packages in the Snap format.
To test unsnap on a freshly installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, I set up a few more packages from the Snap Store in addition to the existing snaps via the Ubuntu Software package manager and then listed them just to be sure (Figure 2). I then downloaded the unsnap script from GitHub. To do this, I first had to install the <I>git<I> package and then run the command from Listing 1.
Listing 1: Installing unsnap
$ git clone https://github.com/popey/unsnap
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