update-manager tries to update snaps even if snaps are not installed

[Ferdi]

On my laptop running Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa, the update manager tries for several minutes to update snaps every time the update-manager is used.

This operation is pointless, because I have removed all snaps from my installation and do not run the snapd deamon.

The update manager should check whether snapd is running at all, and if not, it should not try to update snaps, because they are apparently not in use.

Currently resorting to not using the update manager, because it never ends...
apt works perfectly.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

Currently for update-manager to skip over snap updates you'll need to have snapd uninstalled entirely.

[Ferdi (ferdi-sttc-nlp)]

I had not removed snapd because of it being a dependency of ubuntu-desktop.

However, removing snapd did not also remove ubuntu-desktop (seem to remember it did do so in previous versions) and sort of kept it also for possible future use of snaps if applicable for my usecases. In order to be able to use update-manager i have now removed snapd from my system.

Still I think that if snapd is not running, update-manager should not try to update snaps. Currently update manager tries to update snaps that I had already removed before stopping snapd. The process takes about a minute for every snap that was removed, resulting in an error message in the log, because the snap obviously cannot be found.

May 13 19:24:17 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[7502]: error: no snap found for "core18"
May 13 19:25:57 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[7535]: error: no snap found for "gnome-3-34-1804"
May 13 19:27:37 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[7899]: error: no snap found for "gtk-common-themes"
May 13 19:29:17 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[7957]: error: no snap found for "snap-store"
May 13 19:30:57 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[7992]: error: no snap found for "gnome-3-28-1804"
May 13 19:32:37 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[8019]: error: no snap found for "gnome-calculator"
May 13 19:34:17 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[8041]: error: no snap found for "gnome-characters"
May 13 19:35:57 Biodanza01 update-notifier.desktop[8058]: error: no snap found for "gnome-logs"

Leading to the question, why is it trying to update snaps that have been removed.