I can't believe people construed the lack of this feature in a brand new software as bad Canonical want to kill deb! It's a brand new software. Features need work. Either go and write them or wait for someone else to do it.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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I can't believe people construed the lack of this feature in a brand new software as bad Canonical want to kill deb!
Most loud mouth open source enthusiasts are often toxic entitled choosing beggars. If any of their desires are not met, the project is dying or dead even though the statistics say otherwise.
Fork it and fix things you want to make it better?
No way bro. I want someone else to work on the feature I requested one year ago.
They removed installing another package that did this by default in the same version where they introduced the App Center. Ubuntu Software never handled installing third-party debs, gdebi did. And in the version where they introduced the App Center, they stopped bundling gdebi by default.
Also, the old behavior was that you double click on a deb file and App Center just hangs. This was shipped in the LTS.
This has been false for a while. The Ubuntu Software Center has been handling deb installs for a while on my machines. I just checked on my oldest machine - 20.04 - and the Ubuntu Software app launches on double clicking a deb file. I do not have gdebi installed. I don't recall when it replaced gdebi, whether it was in 16.04, 18.04 or 20.04 but it's definitely the case in 20.04. So check your info before getting worked up.
That would definitely be valid for a smaller community supported distro like mint, but canonical is a big company that already has kind of a bad reputation for things like that so I think it was reasonable for people to complain
A big company eh? They're about 20 times smaller than Red Hat. They very much depend on Debian and the larger FOSS community to get their OS built.
I've been on this train since 2004 and I've been paying attention. Not all but a lot of the flak they've been getting over the years has been based on misinformation and ignorance. But trying to get things objective and correct doesn't make for a good flame war.
It's sort of annoying that they removed that feature in the first place. Recently, I've been using the Nala frontend for APT, since it maintains history similar to DNF/yum, so I try to install all packages through the command-line. The Ubuntu App Center has always been a mild disaster...
I mean of course it is strange to not have that feature.
But guys please dont install apps from random .deb files! It is extremely insecure, may never be updated and is just bad
What if the deb is from a GitHub repository that matches the MD5 hash?
If the hash and the binary come from the same download location, how does this improve anything?
Also always nice is when there is a PGP signature but the key cannot be found anywhere.
It's not just about the verification/reproducibility, these random ass .deb files sometimes don't have proper dependency information and/or repository support. So it may work for now and might stop working on the future when some library upgrades on your system. Or even worse, they may fucking block system library upgrades leaving you insecure at worst and out of support at best.
But no flatpak
it's so annoying that these repositories are so ancient that debs are necessary at all . but it comes in handy for things like lutris, which Ubuntu and mint shipped a broken version for at least a year