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I have question which is what is the difference apt and snap. I using both of them but there is a small problem between them. I already install chromium-browser software. I want to remove it but when I use "sudo apt remove chromium-browser" it says removed but I can still see chromium software in show application tab and working perfectly. And I already use purge prompt still same. But when I use "sudo snap remove chromium" it says remove and completely removed. Why is this happening?

P.S: I am using Ubuntu 22.04.2

synotic988
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2 Answers2

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snap and apt ( or deb's) are different packaging systems. Some software is nowadays only availabe as a snap-package but was distributed as deb-package in earlier days. To make the snap installable via apt, so called transitional deb-packages are used.

chromium-browser is such a transitional deb-package, when you install it, it will pull in the snap-package chromium.

When you remove the deb-package chromium-browser it will just remove the transitional deb-package but not the snap-package chromium, thus the application is not uninstalled and still functions properly, if you want to remove the snap you'd have to run snap remove chromium, not snap remove chromium-broser as you wrote in your question, a snap named chromium-broser or even chromium-browser simply does not exist.

~$ snap find chromium
Name                      Version         Publisher        Notes  Summary
chromium                  115.0.5790.102  canonical✓       -      Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome
chromium-ffmpeg           0.1             canonical✓       -      FFmpeg codecs (free and proprietary) for use by third-party browser snaps
...
...
...

~$ snap find chromium-broser
No matching snaps for "chromium-broser"


~$ snap find chromium-browser
No matching snaps for "chromium-browser"


~$ apt show chromium-browser | grep Description


WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.


Description: Transitional package - chromium-browser -> chromium snap
mook765
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apt is a traditional packet manager. It is meant for all Linux packages. But Snap is meant for Ubuntu at first and other Linux distributions later. Where Snap and apt differ, however, is in how they package software. Snap includes everything required to run an application -- including its dependencies -- in a single package, but apt expects users to deploy dependencies as separate packages alongside the app package.

bavath devadass
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  • So you mean apt promt is remove it some packages (not the critical main software packages) and snap completely? – synotic988 Jul 28 '23 at 09:01