How to install Opera web browser on Linux

Opera is a web browser based on the Chromium project. While not as popular as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, it has been around a lot longer than both of them and offers a great web browsing experience with its sleek user interface.

Although it’s based on an open source project, Opera developers include their own closed source and proprietary additions in the final package. This is frowned upon in the Linux world, which means that Opera is almost never the default browser on a Linux distribution. Furthermore, it may not be included in official repositories, so it can’t even be installed (by default) with a distro’s package manager.

Despite this, it’s not hard to install Opera on a Linux system. You just need to follow a couple extra steps. In this guide, we’ll show you the step by step instructions for installing the Opera web browser an all popular Linux distributions.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to install Opera on Debian, Red Hat, and Arch Linux based systems

Opera web browser running on Linux

Opera web browser running on Linux

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions
Category Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System Any Linux distro
Software Opera web browser
Other Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Install Opera on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint

Debian Linux systems and the distros based on it, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali, etc. can use the Opera PPA to install the web browser. Open a terminal and use the following commands to setup the PPA and install Opera.

$ wget -qO- https://deb.opera.com/archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=i386,amd64] https://deb.opera.com/opera-stable/ stable non-free"
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install opera-stable

If you’d prefer to install the snap package instead, you can use the following command on Ubuntu or any other distro that has snap enabled.

$ sudo snap install opera


To keep Opera up to date on your system, simply use the same commands as above to update it.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install opera-stable

If you decide that you’d like to remove Opera from your system in the future, use the following command to uninstall the web browser.

$ sudo apt purge opera-stable

Install Opera on Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora

Open a terminal and use the following commands to setup the Opera repo and install the web browser on Red Hat based Linux distributions, such as CentOS, Red Hat, and Fedora. First, we’ll install the signing key.

$ sudo rpm --import https://rpm.opera.com/rpmrepo.key

Next, copy and paste all of the following lines to your terminal to add the repo.

$ sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/opera.repo <<RPMREPO
[opera]
name=Opera packages
type=rpm-md
baseurl=https://rpm.opera.com/rpm
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://rpm.opera.com/rpmrepo.key
enabled=1
RPMREPO


Finally, you can use dnf package manager to install Opera.

$ sudo dnf install opera-stable

To keep Opera up to date on your system, simply use the commands below to update it.

$ sudo dnf update
$ sudo dnf install opera-stable

If you decide that you’d like to remove Opera from your system in the future, use the following command to uninstall the web browser.

$ sudo dnf remove opera-stable

Install Opera on Arch Linux and Manjaro

Open a terminal and use the following commands to install Opera on Arch Linux, Manjaro, and other Arch Linux based distros. The default repos already include Opera, so there’s no extra configuration needed.

$ sudo pacman -Syu
$ sudo pacman -S opera

To keep Opera up to date on your system, simply use the same commands as above to update it.

$ sudo pacman -Syu
$ sudo pacman -S opera

If you decide that you’d like to remove Opera from your system in the future, use the following command to uninstall the web browser.

$ sudo pacman -R opera

Conclusion

In this guide, we saw how to install one of the world’s oldest browsers, Opera, on an assortment of popular Linux distributions. The closed source portions of Opera’s code causes us to jump through an extra hoop or two for installation on certain distros, but it still isn’t difficult to install. Now you can enjoy Opera’s sleek and customizable user interface while browsing the web.



Comments and Discussions
Linux Forum