A possibility of a root cause.
So I updated the bug with the actual screenshot of btop instead of a political 
statement.  [I left the original for your amusement]
Take a look at the disk statistics.  I have a modest root partition.
I found that the process of uninstalling the app fills the root partition very 
very slowly.
After 30-40 min the root partition started approaching 100% utilization and I 
killed the process.
What I'm thinking is the snap architecture has a backup feature that uses the 
root partition to create backups of the snap app that is being removed.  In the 
case of steam, with several games attached, this backup is utterly immense.   
In this case I was removing Oblivion: Remastered, Skyrim, Fallout 4 etc....  
Perhaps hundreds of gigs.  Perhaps there is insufficient logic in this backup 
procedure and it was attempting to use gzip to reduce the size of the backup.  
It seems it would have failed, rendering the machine unstable or unusable - I'm 
betting on the latter, but am not brave enough to let it go through with the 
process.

I used the Disk Usage Analysis program that comes with this distribution
to determine where on the root partition the file was being placed.  I
could not find anything growing using this tool, but the partition was
clearly filling up. based on BTOP.  This snap function seems to render
Ubuntu unstable.  What I would do generally to mitigate this
vulnerability is to create a dedicated partition for the location snap
uses for these backups, but I can't figure out how this is done, nor
what resources specifically are used.

All of this suggests an architectural/design flaw in the snap
application that undermines the whole OS.

Possible changes:
- Alter base installation to create an optional partition for this high 
disk-utilization snap functionality, so the OS is not undermined if the 
partition is filled.
- Add logic that calculates when everything is too large to manage and drop 
snap backup procedure when it would crash the machine.  
- In the case there is adequate disk storage on the root partition, calculate 
the time required to process the backup and give the user an option to abort 
this backup to save an hour of time.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2119394

Title:
  Uninstallation hobbled by gzip

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