Solus Linux Starts Snap Removal: AppArmor Patchset First To Go

Solus is one of those Linux distributions that's built from scratch. Even though it has had its fair share of ups and downs, its developers have been able to consistently provide a reliable experience to their users.

Since some time, it has been shipping with pre-installed support for Snaps, the infamous packaging format by Canonical. However, that is now changing.

For better or for the worse? I will leave that to you to decide. 🙃

Removal of Snaps Begins: What To Expect?

a screenshot of solux linux 4.5 with about system and terminal open — Solus 4.5

Announced yesterday, the developers of Solus have dropped the AppArmor patchset provided by Canonical from their current Linux kernel branch, resulting in Snaps now running with “Partial” confinement when using Solus's current kernel, their LTS kernel still has the patches, though.

If you were wondering whether AppArmor support was completely disabled, Solus team member Rune Morling, clarified that in a discussion a few days ago, stating that:

AppArmor support is still enabled in the kernel; it's only the Ubuntu-specific patchset necessary for snap confinement that has been dropped from my reading of the situation.

As for the “Partial confinement” bit, the situation with it is quite perplexing.

My best guess is that it is a partial implementation of Snap confinement, and an inferior version of the “Strict” level of confinement, which restricts snaps to run in isolation, with minimal access to the system.

But, here's the kicker, Canonical never really explained what that means in their documentation, there's even an unresolved bug report that dates back to 2020, which outlines the same issue.

On Solus's part, the distro will start showing the following warning when a snap command is used:

WARNING: snap is running with partial confinement. See https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/software/third-party/snap for details

Which can be hidden using:

sudo snap hide-confinement-warning

Moving on, the above-mentioned changes were done in a bid to reduce the maintenance overhead for the developers. They now don't have to handle the patchset which contains over 60 individual patches, all maintained/updated by Canonical.

Which, according to the developers of Solus takes a long time, or sometimes doesn't even happen, with Linux kernel 6.9 being an example of such an occurrence.

This also means that they no longer have to build ISO images on a team member's system, those can now be generated on their servers, making it easier to upload images to the download servers for their OpenCollective backers.

As for what's in store for the future, the developers of Solus are aiming to completely remove support for Snap at the beginning of 2025. They have made Flatpaks the go-to way for installing applications that aren't on Solus's repositories.

Users are advised to follow the migration guide to switch to Flatpak before the inevitable removal of Snap happens.

Of course, those who like using Snaps can follow the official guide to get it back. At the time of writing, it was not updated, but it should be when Snaps are completely removed from Solus.

💬 As expected, not everyone is a fan of Snaps, and Solus is going to join one of the many distros out there, which don't ship with it. What are your thoughts on this?

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