
Opera launches as a snap for Linux users - popey
https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2018/08/opera-launches-snap-linux-users/
======
conradk
I tried using Ubuntu 18.04 recently. While snap seem like a good idea, the
main issue I have is that there seems to be no way to know who publishes
snaps. A list of approved vendors would be useful.

Sure, there are some 'Verified Accounts', and Opera has one. But the main app
for Slack, Spotify, Telegram Desktop or BitWarden come from unverified
accounts. And some of these are not sandboxed, like the Slack app. Having
BitWarden, a password manager, use an unverified account seems totally crazy.

~~~
Iolaum
I like snaps but I ve stopped using them because they auto update Windows10
style. In the snap forums a lot of people asked for the ability to disable
updates in order to update only when you want. Integration with the software
and updates app in Ubuntu would go a long way here. But no snap devs have
refused that (unless you are an enterprise customer and use a proprietary
extension). So if you have snaps their update process is totally separate from
other apps in your Ubuntu desktop and outside of your control barring some
time settings for soft auto update exceptions hidden in the CLI interface.

~~~
themihai
The developers don't want to maintain old clients...backward compatibility
proved too expensive. Apple proved autoupdate is the way. Browser vendors did
the same.

~~~
binomialxenon
I don't think people expect old clients to be maintained, but I generally
don't like auto-updating. I don't want my computer to use CPU, disk I/O, or
network bandwidth for updates except when it's convenient for me. Also, in
some cases it can be worth it to stick with an older version if a newer
version introduces a bug or something.

~~~
Sir_Substance
Me too. I'm going to avoid snaps now that I know this.

------
kaskavalci
I don't understand using a browser that is developed by a for-profit company
which happens to be their only product. Because of current owners, I would
never use Opera.

Firefox is pretty good guys. You should check it out. And also donate.

disclaimer: no association with Mozilla/Firefox in any way.

~~~
minikites
Chrome is the other outlier here. Apple and Microsoft have no real reason to
spy on you when you use Safari or Edge and Firefox is operated by a not-for-
profit entity. Google and Opera's entire business model depend on surveilling
their users.

~~~
JdeBP
Vivaldi claims that it is entirely employee-owned.

* [https://vivaldi.com/company/](https://vivaldi.com/company/)

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Snaps and flatpaks are just a vector for malware. They're worse in every way
than a traditional package manager. I'm all for packages which containerize
their software (we already chroot a lot of software like this), but
snaps/flatpaks are just dumb. There's no substitute for your package
maintainer personally auditing and preparing the package for you.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I passionately disagree. Package managers are inflexible conflict causing
garbage and repos are appstore-like walled gardens which often contain out of
date software, when they have what you're looking for at all.

Snap and Flatpak aren't much better, though. Give me AppImage any day.

~~~
binomialxenon
The repository system on Debian, Arch, Fedora is clearly not a walled garden
like Apple or Microsoft's app stores. Any site can host a repository that you
can add to your package manager's sources, and you're free to install
.deb/.rpm packages from any source you want, not to mention tarballs or
compiling from source code. Also, there's no motive for lock-in like
mainstream app stores have.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Only if those sources keep things up to date with the changes in the main
repository, _and every other repository the user uses_ , so as to avoid
conflicts.

> not to mention tarballs or compiling from source code

Seriously? You may as well say iOS is open because you can root it.

------
darren0
As a technology, I've had far better experience with snap over flatpak. It
does bother me though with snaps that it all seems tied to a proprietary
store. Does anyone know if it's possible to run the server side components
yourself.

~~~
sitzkrieg
you can download a snap not unlike a deb and install it, if thats what you are
after

~~~
eikenberry
I think they meant more about running your own snap repo that people could
point snap to and get things. Say like an internal company snap repo.

------
pleasecalllater
Opera was great years ago. Now it's just another chrome clone.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Unfortunately true. Although, with the built-in mouse gestures and ad blocking
without having to maintain extensions that bog things down, ask for their own
updates, etc.; I still find it to be the least bad browser available. Vivaldi
is too slow and Otter Browser is not quite there yet.

But I still miss Opera 12...

~~~
jchw
I wish they would've considered going open source instead. Sure, their
rendering engine was far from perfect, but it had its advantages, even to
Chrome at the time.

~~~
earenndil
[https://git.teknik.io/Zero3K/presto](https://git.teknik.io/Zero3K/presto)
here is the source code.

~~~
jchw
That's cool, but also extremely sketchy :) And if it's really just Presto,
probably not horribly useful.

------
jannes
I really like Opera as a browser. But I am still wary of its owners.

48.0%: Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., Ltd. (Zhou Yahui)

27.5%: Qifei International Development Co. Limited (Qihoo 360)

19.5%: Keeneyes Future Holdings Inc (Zhou Yahui)

5.0%: Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I L.P.

I don't know anything about these firms and whether I can trust them.

Something about this ownership structure just makes me uneasy about the
product.

~~~
shakna
As with all things Chinese, the story is never entirely clear. Propaganda from
both sides of the Firewall obscure a lot. However...

\---

Qihoo 360 may be the owners of StartCom, and WoSign, who behaved so badly both
Chrome and Firefox have decided their certificates can never be trusted again.

Got to figure that it isn't an accident that they bought a (large) interest in
Opera.

And there's the confusing story of the Chinese government sanctioning Qihoo
360 themselves over privacy violations to do with webcams.

They tend to be a company mired in controversy.

(They also have the controlling share in Golden Brick Capital).

\---

Beijing Kunlun Tech aren't that well known in the West. They started out as
online gambling, however they also bought out Grindr, and now a controlling
stake in Opera.

They don't seem to have a huge amount of direction, besides blasting adverts
and trying to eak out a profit wherever they can. Which they seem extremely
successful in.

Successful enough that Zhou Yahui ended up paying $1.1billion to settle a
divorce with his wife quite recently.

\---

So, basically, ownership is split between a gambling tycoon, and a company
with an awful reputation around security and privacy who have a vested
interest in a browser, and how they can influence the web from it.

------
kbumsik
Opera, if you are watchng this thread, could you please update the outdated
documentation on the command line option? [1] This command line format was
valid until 5 years ago, when Opera switched to Chromium. Currently Opera only
works with Chromium’s command line format and the documentation does not
mention about this. I noticed this problem when I was answering a SO question
[2] so I contacted Opera but there is no response.

[1]:
[https://www.opera.com/docs/switches/](https://www.opera.com/docs/switches/)

[2]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51123537/webbrowser-
open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51123537/webbrowser-open-breaks-
the-link-python-3-7/51128165#51128165)

------
msl09
I really wished snaps worked well on most distros but as of now I always run
into a bunch of bugs when installing stuff from it.

~~~
carlob
Agreed, there are way too many apps that were developed without the sandbox in
mind and just don't work as a snap...

------
peterwwillis
Can anyone who has released commercial Linux software comment on providing
giant static binaries to distribute apps? I always found this the easiest way
to adopt a 3rd party app on Linux, but I don't know how difficult it is in
practice if the app is humongous and complicated.

------
octosphere
About time. I could never find a reliable way to get Opera running on Linux
(Ubuntu).

~~~
teddyh
[http://www.opera.com/computer/linux](http://www.opera.com/computer/linux)

~~~
pmontra
I saw the parent got downvoted but it's correct. The .deb configures the ppa
to get the updates.

Check [http://deb.opera.com/](http://deb.opera.com/)

It installs mine from [http://deb.opera.com/opera-stable/dists/stable/non-
free/bina...](http://deb.opera.com/opera-stable/dists/stable/non-free/binary-
amd64/)

It always worked well, both the updates and Opera (Ubuntu 16.04)

------
purerandomness
Can somebody explain who's the target audience for Flatpak/Snap?

Doesn't each distro provide packages for software?

~~~
jillesvangurp
The problem with package managers/installers/setup scripts/etc. is that they
turn file systems in a mess and that filesystems tend to be different between
linux installations, even of the same distribution.

So snaps do for user facing software what docker did for server side software.
Good idea in general and since most distributions struggle to stay on top of
release quality updates from upstream, a great way to stay up to date, quickly
try out some sofware package, or download software that your linux
distribution hasn't gotten around to absorbing into their repositories.

Sort of the Linux equivalent of dragging an OS X .app file to your
/Applications folder (or to trash for uninstall). There's no good technical
reason for application install/uninstall to be more complex than that.

Normal user facing software should not require modifications to the OS to run.
The linux practice of packages basically taking a royal dump on the filesystem
and generally requiring root access to even get installed is no longer
something that is remotely sane to do.

IMHO, operating systems should ultimately be immutable and basically be
similar to a snap. You update it as a whole and you don't modify parts of it.

Linux has had a hard time with end users despite decades of "surely this year
is the year of linux on the desktop". Never happened. A lot of that has to do
with software installation, package managers and upgrades being a convoluted
mess that always ends up in somebody doing stuff in a command line terminal to
fix.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
>Linux has had a hard time with end users despite decades of "surely this year
is the year of linux on the desktop". Never happened. A lot of that has to do
with software installation, package managers and upgrades being a convoluted
mess that always ends up in somebody doing stuff in a command line terminal to
fix.

Snap still has a little bit to go to be much better though! The "programs
shouldn't mess with the system" mentality includes restrictions to the
filesystem. That's a problem because many programs do need to mess with local
files (e.g., sending a file in an IM program, working on a file, saving a
file...). You get a spooky message about installing such programs with
"classic" permissions, and, even then, such functionality suffers. Discord can
only access some subset of the filesystem, and Skype straight up crashes when
it tries. Also, opening links in Discord doesn't work in the Snap version
while it does in the non-Snap version. Rabble!

But the idea is great. Convenience and no dynamic library breakage for some MB
of disk space in ${current_year}? Yes, plz!

~~~
petre
Yet their web based counterparts work just fine. Discord works great, Skype
not so great, maybe because they pour resources into the app thay displays
ads.

------
subsection1h
Weird. Many (most?) of the commenters in this thread have accounts created in
2017-2018:

AnIdiotOnTheNet, binomialxenon, Boulth, crtasm, Iolaum, jillesvangurp, kyrofa,
logix, maccio92, maxyme, newnewpdro, octosphere, pleasecalllater, sincerely,
sitzkrieg, shrimp_emoji, taway234252, xmmrm

~~~
kyrofa
Yep. Thank HN for not supporting account renames. My old account has higher
karma, too.

~~~
stuartaxelowen
My account literally has my old legal name, and can't be changed

------
newnewpdro
Get ready for all the Linux malware!

