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I have a four year old notebook which was initially running Ubuntu 18.10 and then upgraded to each "normal" Ubuntu version every six months. Currently, it is running 22.10. When I run a snap list command, I get the following output:

Name                            Version             Rev    Tracking         Publisher   Notes
bare                            1.0                 5      latest/stable    canonical✓  base
core                            16-2.58.3           14946  latest/stable    canonical✓  core
core18                          20230320            2721   latest/stable    canonical✓  base
core20                          20230308            1852   latest/stable    canonical✓  base
core22                          20230325            607    latest/stable    canonical✓  base
firefox                         111.0.1-2           2487   latest/stable    mozilla✓    -
gnome-3-38-2004                 0+git.6f39565       137    latest/stable    canonical✓  -
gnome-42-2204                   0+git.e7d97c7       68     latest/stable    canonical✓  -
gtk-common-themes               0.1-81-g442e511     1535   latest/stable    canonical✓  -
hunspell-dictionaries-1-7-2004  1.7-20.04+pkg-6fd6  2      latest/stable    brlin       -
snap-store                      41.3-66-gfe1e325    638    latest/stable    canonical✓  -
snapd-desktop-integration       0.1                 57     latest/stable/…  canonical✓  -

Do I really need core18, gnome-3-28-2004, and any other of the above listed snaps on my system?

On a similar test system I tried:

# snap remove gnome-3-38-2004
gnome-3-38-2004 removed
# snap remove core18
core18 removed

with no warning or error message. But, after that, firefox did not start and gave me an ERROR: not connected to the gnome-3-38-2004 content interface. message.

So, I had to do snap install gnome-3-38-2004 to correct the problem.

What of the other snaps can be safely removed from my system?

FedKad
  • 10,515

1 Answers1

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Thanks for the pointers in the comments.

I figured out that the output of

$ grep "default-provider:\|base:" /snap/*/*/meta/snap.yaml | awk '{print $NF}' | sort -u
bare
core20
core22
gnome-3-38-2004
gnome-42-2204
gtk-common-themes

or

$ grep "default-provider:\|base:" /snap/*/current/meta/snap.yaml | awk '{print $NF}' | sort -u
bare
core20
core22
gnome-3-38-2004
gnome-42-2204
gtk-common-themes

would list the snaps that should not be removed; in other words, the snaps that are dependencies of other snaps.

Note that, the snap system did not warn me that the gnome-3-38-2004 snap cannot or should not be removed.

FedKad
  • 10,515
  • 2
    The fact that snap doesn't warn you when a needed snap is removed feels like a bug in snap, and should be reported as such. Here's the link to the bug tracker on launchpad. https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+filebug – popey Apr 05 '23 at 12:05
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    You may want to refine the /snap/*/*/meta/snap.yaml to /snap/*/current/meta/snap.yaml simply because you probably don't care if an old release of an installed snap requires some other snap, but you likely do care about currently active versions. – popey Apr 05 '23 at 12:07
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    Thanks @popey for the comments. I also reported the bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/2015348 – FedKad Apr 05 '23 at 12:10