The advent of Linux Mint 20 was welcome news to millions of Mint enthusiasts and fans. It’s a long-term release ( LTS ) and provides numerous features and enhancements. Sadly, Linux Mint developers decided to exclude snap which put a damper on most users.
Thankfully, you can easily install and enable Snap on Linux Mint with just a few simple commands as we shall demonstrate in this tutorial.
What is Snap? ( Definition of terms )
Snap, also referred to as snappy, is a software packaging and deployment system that was an innovation of Canonical – the same company that is behind the development of Ubuntu.
Snaps are standalone, cross-distribution, and dependency-free applications that are easy to install and manage. They ship with their source code, libraries, and dependencies to make software installations. Snaps are distribution-agnostic and, therefore, can run on all major Linux systems.
Snapd is a daemon or a service that helps manage snap applications.
In this guide, we will demonstrate how you can install snap on Linux Mint 20.
Step 1: Remove or delete the nosnap.ref file
To get started, you need to delete or remove the nosnap.pref file from your Linux Mint 20 system as follows.
$ sudo rm /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
Once that is done, rebuild the APT cache by updating the package lists.
$ sudo apt update
Step 2: Install snapd daemon
With that out of the way, install the snap package manager as follows. The command installs the snapd daemon that handles and manages snap packages.
$ sudo apt install snapd
Once the installation is complete, start the snapd daemon and enable it to start automatically on boot time.
$ sudo systemctl start snapd
$ sudo systemctl enable snapd
You can then verify its running status as follows:
$ sudo systemctl status snapd
From the status, you can see that the snapd daemon is running as expected.
Step 3: Managing snap applications
With snap already enabled, we can now begin installing applications from the snap store. You can start by searching for a particular snap package using the syntax:
$ snap find package_name
For instance, t search for the availability of Spotify snap package, run:
$ snap find spotify
To install a snap application, use the syntax:
$ sudo snap install package_name
For example, to install Spotify, execute the command:
$ sudo snap install spotify
To keep track of the available snaps on your system, execute:
$ snap list
To remove a snap package, use the syntax:
$ sudo snap remove package_name
You can get a list of all the options you can use with snap by simply typing the command:
$ snap
Conclusion
That was was a guide on how to install snap on Linux Mint 20. Our hope is that this guide has provided enough insights on how to install and get started with snaps.

Karim Buzdar holds a degree in telecommunication engineering and holds several sysadmin certifications including CCNA RS, SCP, and ACE. As an IT engineer and technical author, he writes for various websites.