The core18 snap installed itself automatically when I first installed my andy-testsnap-py snap. I never installed it myself. Running andy-testsnap-py now gives the same error: cannot locate core snap.
P.S. I just restarted my virtualbox vm containing 16.04 and got the error during startup: “The application Snap user application autostart helper has closed unexpectedly”, Executable path /usr/lib/snapd/snap-confine, Package snapd 2.34.2ubuntu0.1, ProblemType Crash, ApportVersion 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.18, Architecture amd64 etc.
The core “core snap” is different from the core18 “base snap”, please install the core snap manually and verify if the issue is still reproducible.
FYI: The snap command will use the snapd distribution in the core snap if found, so there’s two (possibly different) snapd distributions exist simultaneously in the system.
then right click on the icon in the dock to add the app to their favourites. Not an ideal user experience. Why isn’t core auto installed as well as core18?
P.S. I rebooted the vm prior to trying this, and didn’t get the other startup error I described. Rebooted again after the above steps and still no error, so perhaps it has settled down…
There are no pre-installed snaps on 16.04. It just ships a .deb packaged snapd that can bootstrap the system.
I guess the core snap (together with an updated snapd) only gets installed if another requested snap uses it as a base. Given that the core snap is also used to get an up to date snapd onto the system, perhaps it should be installed even if you only install core18 snaps. At least until we start using the snapd snap on classic systems.