| I think this thing about apps not available for apt is in the past. I specifically use Ubuntu because there are .debs for everything. Most of the new apps for linux published on Internet "need" to have a .dev available, if they want to became popular. Well, I have found some strange, out of common, software - mostly comercial stuff - which doesn't have any .deb available nor ppas, nor nothing. It is clearly a decision from somebody who said "no, we are not spending hours packaging our app, if they want it, they will try to install it with the methods we will provide" Kind of nonsense, except that if you're in Linux looking to install a comercial app, special snowflake, is probably because you have zero chances to do otherwise, then you bit the bullet and try whatever crazy method to deploy their app they have put in place. Most common stuff I found:
- Just download my zipped binary, you know how to deploy it
- Just run this command line, "sh something" giving it root credentials to run code from the Internet (YEAH I KNOW TOO, as much insecure as it gets) Having said that, many comercial apps are there for to be easyly downloaded as .debs (they should just install with a GUI right out from the link, in old-Ubuntu behavior). Or they even offer you detailed instructions to configure a ppa (to manually install with apt). Heck, nowadays it is common sense and good netiquette to make your installation scripts in the downloaded .deb to just deploy the ppa for apt, so next upgrade happens automatically. If you ask me and I wouldn't dreaming to control the app-deployment infrastructure in Linux, I would say "yeah, you need to contact EVERY software not providing the .deb format and start working with them, providing them free support, even free scripts to handle the packaging" I remember in the 90s, there was LOTs of shareware because Microsoft knew this stuff from the 70s and 80s: if you want you're software in use, you need to talk directly with those who could probably use it. No, links hanging in some flashy website won't cut it, nor repos in github half sharing some code. |