Run Portable Linux Apps on Ubuntu 16.04 with Orbital Apps

You may have already known portableapps.com which provides us a host of portable apps that can run on Windows. You may ask, what about Linux? Can I run portable apps on Linux? This tutorial explains how to run portable Linux apps on Ubuntu 16.04 with Orbital Apps.

Run Portable Linux Apps with Orbital Apps

First, go to https://orbital-apps.com/ to download the ORB launcher. If you prefer terminal commands, then use this command to download ORB launcher in terminal.

wget https://www.orbital-apps.com/files/orb-launcher/orb-launcher_0.1.047.iso

Then open the Nautilus file manager, go to the download folder and mount the ORB launcher ISO with Disk Image Mounter. (Gnome disk image mounter is provided by gnome-disk-utility.)

You will be asked if you want to run the software, click the Run button.

Then you need to enter your password to install ORB launcher on your Ubuntu 16.04 system.

Once the installation has completed, you can go to https://www.orbital-apps.com to download all kinds of portable Linux apps like abiword, audacious, audacity, blender, bless, brasero, clementine, darktable, deluge, etc.

To run these portable Linux apps, just double-click and the application will open. There’s no need to install them with apt-get or dpkg.

These portable Linux apps are files with .orb extension which stands for open runnable bundle. In reality, an .orb file is an .iso file (ISO-9660) with additional content and meta data. .orb files are compressed with squashfs, making them suitable for USB thumb drives.

Ubuntu 64 bit systems are well supported by Orbital apps. In my test, these portable apps didn’t work at all in other distributions such as Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux and Elementary OS.

I hope the article helped you run portable apps on Ubuntu 16.04. Comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome. If you find this post useful, please subscribe to our free newsletter or follow us on Google+, Twitter or like our Facebook page