PSA: Ubuntu Eoan Upgrade Process Snapifies Some Apps

While upgrading a laptop from Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) to the upcoming 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) release, I noticed something unexpected: Ubuntu automatically replaced some of my local GNOME packages (gnome-calculator, gnome-characters, gnome-logs, and gnome-system-monitor) with their Snap equivalents.

Regardless of how you feel about the promise of containerized application formats like Snap, the reality is still not great. The Snapified GNOME packages are bloated and slow compared to their bare metal counterparts, and worst of all, are unable to seamlessly integrate with the underlying GNOME Shell DE, breaking things like Overview integrations.

Well damn! Haha.

Thankfully those apps are still available in the Eoan repositories as regular packages, so you can manually un-replace them after the distribution upgrade has completed.

# List installed Snaps.
sudo snap list

# Remove Snaps you don't want.
sudo snap remove gnome-calculator gnome-characters…

# Install the packages normally.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-calculator gnome-characters…

# Reboot for good measure.
sudo reboot