Opera Embraces Snap for Linux

Ubuntu’s Snap is gaining popularity. After Microsoft, now Opera is backing Snap packaging format to distribute their apps to Linux platform. Opera may not be one of the most popular browsers today, but they did a lot of innovation back then, including tabs, saved sessions, pop-up blocking, and speed dial. Opera and Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, worked together to bring Opera web browser to Linux a Snap.

“The addition of Opera to the Snap Store enables users of all major Linux distributions to benefit from the auto-updating and security features that Snap provides. The Opera Snap is supported on Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Elementary, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and more distributions,” Canonical said in a press release.

“We are delighted to welcome Opera to the Snap Store and further expand the choice of applications available to the Linux community. It is popular applications, such as Opera, that have driven the impressive growth of new Snaps to the store and ever-increasing user installs over the last year,” added Jamie Bennett, VP of Engineering, IoT and Devices at Canonical.

To those who don’t know, Snaps are containerized software packages, inspired by Docker containers, that are designed to offer isolation as well as fully self-contained packages that don’t rely on system libraries and dependencies. As a result, developers can use the latest libraries and offer new features without being tied to the system. Snaps also help in treating Linux as single platform instead of looking at each distro as a platform.

Snaps may help bring more mainstream apps to Linux.