Last Opera release for linux was 12.16. That's about 12 skipped updates (I just assume, I'm not familiar with the actual opera versioning) and that's unacceptable. What guarantee does Opera give me that this won't happen again and I won't be stuck with outdated browser for a year?
There is a bit of history and context needed here I think. The last Opera 12 was released about a year ago. Last year they announced they would switch to using Blink instead of their own rendering engine.
The engine switch came with a complete rewrite of their browser as far as I understand it, so they prioritized Windows/OSX stability for a year and now finally came up with a Linux build again. The big gap in version numbers is due to their new browser starting at 15 + the adoption of a much shorter release cycle.
Once Linux builds are made stable I expect they will continue to release builds on all 3 platforms as they were doing for the many years before this slightly extreme shift.
They don't have to switch engines to stop supporting Opera on Linux again. They just have to stop releasing new builds. With Opera being closed source software, Linux users can't just compile it themselves from source. They're stuck with whatever version Opera chooses to release.
