How to Completely Remove Flatpak

In this tutorial, we'll be discussing how to completely remove Flatpak from Linux Mint.

We'll first check what applications are installed with Flatpak. Then we are going to uninstall Flatpak applications.

Finally, we are going to purge the entire Flatpak ecosystem. The main reason for uninstalling Flatpak is the huge disk space which takes up.

You can find more ways to clean up disk space in Linux Mint in this article:

7 Steps To Free Up Space On Linux Mint

Step 1: List all Flatpak application

Depending on your Linux Mint version all Flatpak applications can be listed by terminal command like:

flatpak list

result:

flatpak list
Ref                                                     Options                                                                                                                                                                              
com.obsproject.Studio/x86_64/stable                     system,current                                                                                                                                                                       
org.gimp.GIMP/x86_64/stable                             system,current                                                                                                                                                                       
org.openshot.OpenShot/x86_64/stable                     system,current

Or by launching Software Manager:

Start Software Manager
Click Flatpak - if available

all apps with green tick are installed and use Flatpak

Step 2: Uninstall all Flatpak application

In this step we are going to remove all Flatpak applications. There are several ways to remove Flatpak applications.

The Software manager allows us to uninstall applications one by one.

Removing multiple Flatpak application at once by:

flatpak uninstall --unused

flatpak uninstall --all

After those commands list of installed applications should be empty or reduced. This can be verified by:

flatpak list

Step 3: Remove Flatpak completely

Even if all Flatpak applications are uninstalled you have a huge amount of disk space occupied by Flatpak. In my case folder:

var/lib/flatpak

it was full with 4 GB.

Next commands helped me to clean this space. To completely remove Flatpak from your system run:

sudo flatpak repair

and:

sudo apt-get remove --autoremove flatpak
sudo apt-get purge flatpak

This time var/lib/flatpak was empty and I was able to win 4 GB.

Error: Remote "flathub" not found

If you face this error than you need to run in terminal:

flatpak remote-add flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Error: Command 'flatpak' not found

In case of error: 'flatpak' not found then you need to install it again by:

sudo apt install flatpak