How to Install Snap on Linux Mint 20

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.