Ubuntu 18.04: Replace snapped apps with their real selves

It all started with the System Monitor. The GNOME System Monitor is supposed to be able to show all the processes running on the system, and to show them in the form of a nice tree of parent-child relationships. But the System Monitor variant installed by default in Ubuntu 18.04 subbornly insisted on showing only my processes, and was utterly unable to show the parent-child relationships between them. It was also unable to distinguish between real filesystems and the forest of virtual filesystems mounted on any modern Linux system, which made the File Systems tab rather useless.

This was unacceptable.

A quick investigation resulted in a shocking conclusion: the preinstalled System Monitor was not a native application; it was a snap. Now I fully agree that snaps may well have their uses, although I’m not sure what those may be. But there is simply no way for System Monitor to do its job if it runs in a sandbox or a container; the hint is in the name: it’s a System Monitor.

Which made me consider than what should be done on server should also be done on workstations, and that is removing snapd. A quick dry-run test showed that removing it was allowed:

$ sudo apt-get --dry-run purge snapd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-software-plugin-snap* snapd*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Taking heart from this test, I went ahead and removed snapd:

$ sudo apt-get --yes purge snapd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-software-plugin-snap* snapd*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 57.1 MB disk space will be freed.
(Reading database ... 115119 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing gnome-software-plugin-snap (3.28.1-0ubuntu4) ...
Removing snapd (2.32.5+18.04) ...
⁞
Removing snap core and revision 4486
⁞
Removing snap gnome-3-26-1604 and revision 59
⁞
Removing snap gnome-calculator and revision 154
⁞
Removing snap gnome-characters and revision 69
⁞
Removing snap gnome-logs and revision 25
⁞
Removing snap gnome-system-monitor and revision 36
⁞
Final directory cleanup
Discarding preserved snap namespaces
Removing extra snap-confine apparmor rules
Removing snapd cache
Removing snapd state

So it’s plain to see that not less than four pre-installed applications came in the form of snaps; fortunately, it was easy to get them back in the form of fully-fledged native packages:

for app in calculator characters logs system-monitor; do
  sudo apt-get --yes --no-install-recommends install gnome-$app
done

Ah, and speaking of GNOME Characters: this is a mostly useless application intended for browsing the ever entertaining emojis in the available fonts; it is definitely not the same thing as the plain old boring and very useful character map, which, for reasons known only by the GNOME steering committee and Canonical, does not come preinstalled. To get it you must install it:

sudo apt-get --yes --no-install-recommends install gucharmap