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I have just upgraded from 16.04 to 20.04 and I read that there is a new package manager called snap. However I still also have apt. Moreover, when I do

snap list

I see a package called python3, version 3.8.0, by a publisher called "om26er" (no idea who this is).

I did not know anything about snap until this morning; I certainly did not install anything by snap myself. How did this python installation got into my computer? And how should I remove it without damaging my system?

More generally: I am quite confused by the fact that I have both apt and snap. How do these two package managers work together? Should I use only one of them and not the other? Sorry for the newbie question - all I want is to have a stable system so that I can get back to work.

Erel Segal-Halevi
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  • Snap is another choice, with advantages & as always disadvantages (security advantages of containerization has costs in resources). There are snap based releases that do rely on snaps (eg. Ubuntu Core yy for IoT appliances/devices) however desktop and server releases (yy.mm in format) are are very much deb based, but can also use snaps. – guiverc Jul 08 '20 at 07:50

2 Answers2

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You certainly should not remove the regular python3 package from the APT package management system. The Ubuntu system depends on it for your operation, and you will break your desktop if you remove that and even if you upgrade that.

You can remove the snap version if you feel like it. The choice is yours. For sure, this package has not been automatically installed. At most, it might have been installed as a dependency of another snap package, if you did not install it explicitly yourself.

APT and snap work independently from each other. Snaps are by design self-contained so they can run on a range of linux systems. A possible benefit of a snap versus an APT package is that it allows you to run a more recent version of some application than the one provided with (and tied to) your system through the packages of your linux distribution. Some software using other toolkits (e.g. KDE applications) or proprietary software can be installed through snap, in a 1) convenient way and 2) without changing or mixing files into your main system. Some further reading on why apt or why snap can be found elsewhere on this site, such as here or here.

vanadium
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If you uninstall the Python 3 snap package Ubuntu will use the Python 3 apt package which is installed in Ubuntu 20.04 by default, but don't remove the Python 3 apt package or many applications that depend on it such as the terminal and the Software app will not work.

If both Python apt and snap managers are installed alongside each other they will not interfere with each other because the snap package Python interpreter can only be started by a command of the form snap run python38.

karel
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