snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems using the Linux kernel and systemd init system. These packages, called snaps, and the tool snapd that uses them, are available on a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users.

With snap, users can easily install Linux applications. By default, snapd checks for updates four times a day and automatically updates the snap application to the latest version. While there are many ways to control when and how often updates are installed, users cannot completely turn off automatic updates for security reasons.

Although the original intention of snap is very good, many developers are deeply troubled by it. From time to time, they will find that commonly used development tools are automatically updated, resulting in incompatibility of plug-ins and dependencies, and they have to roll back the version manually. Because of this, the first thing many developers do after installing Ubuntu is to uninstall snap.

Recently, Ubuntu announced through the official blog that a long-awaited feature has quietly entered the preview stage. From now on, you can completely turn off the automatic update of snap:

snap refresh --hold Command to hold or defer updates for a single snap app or all snap apps on the system, either indefinitely or for a specified period of time. (currently only in edge channelsnapdavailable in

Keep or completely disable snap updates

This function is achieved by using snap refresh order a new --hold parameters are complete.

• For example, to completely disable Firefox’s automatic updates with the command:

snap refresh --hold firefox

• Alternatively, keep 24 hours of automatic updates for Firefox with the command:

snap refresh --hold=24h firefox

• To disable automatic updates for all snap applications, simply omit the package name from the command. Therefore, disable automatic updates for all applications by running the following command.

snap refresh --hold

• Conversely, through --unhold parameter to re-enable automatic updates.

snap refresh --unhold

• To re-enable automatic updates for a specific application, such as Firefox, just add the name to the command:

snap refresh --unhold firefox

This command does not currently appear in the official version of Ubuntu. If you want to try it, you need to switch snapd to the edge channel through the command:

snap refresh snapd --edge

After the test is complete, if you need to switch snapd back to the stable channel, you need to use the command:

snap refresh snapd --stable

The world has suffered from snap for a long time, but with the continuous improvement of the snap update mechanism, Ubuntu finally added support for disabling the automatic update of snap applications. Will you give snap a chance?