death of snaps

Good news! I’ve successfully removed snaps from my system. You might ask why I removed snaps from Ubuntu instead of just switching to another distro that didn’t have snaps. Well, I’ve a personal history with the Ubuntu OS. It’s the first Linux distro that I really used, & nothing is ever going to change that. And I removed snaps because I thought it’d make the system less buggy. I had a theory that if I removed snaps all the glitches in my user applications (Showtime not being able to play PGS subtitles, GNOME Transmission not responding properly when trying to open a torrent file through the GUI, etc.) would disappear. Well, they didn’t, but it did make my computer more simplistic because now this thing can only run Debian packages which I don’t mind. For some unexplainable reason, I’ve an attraction to Debian packages. They don’t glitch & are very stable. I even once thought of switching to Debian. Then I realized that Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro, so switching won’t really make a change anyways.

I had to ask Claude to tell me how I could remove snaps from my machine. I asked it to give its instructions in a PDF, & it did. I followed the instruction line by line, & was eventually able to remove every trace of snaps from my computer. Did it make my computer significantly better? Nope, not at all. Was it an enjoyable learning experience? Yes, it sure was. I just love how you can tinker with the OS in Linux. I could never do something like this in Windows. I actually thought removing snaps would remove almost everything from my computer, & I’d need to run a restart again for the changes to happen. Removing snaps wasn’t that big of a deal. I literally just entered a few commands (I mostly knew what they were doing), & downloaded the .deb package of Firefox, & logged into all my websites & my Mozilla account. Logging into all my websites was the real pain of the journey. I generally avoid making accounts whenever possible, because it’s tedious to deal with so many digital accounts, & whenever I do make an account, I always have to write the details of said account (username, password, registered email) in a notebook for physical safekeeping. And yet, I still had many accounts to log back into.

I may have also introduced a new bug in my system. Removing snaps didn’t make GNOME Transmission less buggy. I had to uninstall that piece of crap & instead use transmission-cli for my torrents. Neither did removing snaps make Showtime (what GNOME calls Video Editor nowadays) better & give it more functionalities. I instead have to use VLC because Showtime is not very powerful. It looks pretty but it doesn’t work nicely. And now, this new bug is proving to be quite a large problem at hand. I still haven’t fixed it, & it’s likely going to take me a few days to fix this. Essentially, this bug is about the search bar in Ubuntu dash. Sometimes, when I search for something, it tells me “No Results” even though I know the app exists. I’m having to use the all applications dashboard to access all my apps, which takes a little longer than searching for the app because I have to use my touchpad to move my pointer around. It’s a slower experience. I’m hoping to remove this bug as soon as possible. The responsibilities of troubleshooting in Linux largely falls onto you, the end user. This is going to take a few days.