I never considered trying to install a package from a local file through apt, but always dpkg. End result is the same of course. The web suggests dpkg rather than apt as well ( or at least the pages I ended up on ).
The maintainers of the PKGBUILD are all arch maintainers, which just downloads the generic .tar.gz file discord provides and puts it in all the places you need for you.
The “official” arch packages are just PKGBUILDs like the AUR, except prebuilt, managed (and signed) by the arch team.
I didn’t know, thanks! I guess in hindsight I meant “official” as in, it’s not just some rando, I can trust it won’t break, and I don’t have to manually download the stuff every time xD
Yep! All those things are true, but it’s due to the hard work of the archlinux team and not discord doing anything valuable. The debian/ubuntu/etc team could probably repackage the tar.xz or include the deb file in their official repos if they wanted. They just don’t. And given how simple the workaround is, i don’t really blame them. Debian isn’t going to ship something that will require constant updating to work with remote servers, and ubuntu probably just wants you to use a snap anyway.
I have checked on every new update because their fuckass client apparently can’t update itself in big 2025 and instead just opens your browser to the download url because that’ll convince people that Linux is great.
Updating itself isn’t really the Linux way of things. The Linux way is to have a centralised place like pacman or apt and to download everything at once. Every app having their own download and update system sounds like a nightmare.
apt and apt-get both use dpkg internally, but these days it’s essentially seen as an implementation detail that regular users don’t need to know about.
dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies (that’s a feature of apt) which means that if you install a Debian package with dpkg, you’ll have to manually install all dependencies first, and they won’t be marked as automatically installed (so autoremove won’t remove them if they’re not needed any more). Using apt solves that.
The web suggests dpkg because either the articles are old, or they’re based on outdated knowledge :)
dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies (that’s a feature of apt) which means that if you install a Debian package with dpkg, you’ll have to manually install all dependencies first, and they won’t be marked as automatically installed
Usually installing a manually downloaded package and its dependencies works like this: # dpkg -i package-file.deb # apt-get -f install
So apt-get can be used to install missing dependencies afterwards while marking them as automatically installed.
Huh TIL.
I never considered trying to install a package from a local file through apt, but always dpkg. End result is the same of course. The web suggests dpkg rather than apt as well ( or at least the pages I ended up on ).
Discord is distributed as a .Deb if you don’t use flatpak because they can’t be bothered to set up a repo.
The very useful thing about local file install is that unlike dpkg, apt will install dependencies automatically
And here I am using gdebi for those kinds of local packages…
Same with Zoom.
Thats weird, they do have an arch official package and that’s the one they usually don’t make because AUR is a thing. Have you checked lately?
An “official” arch package? The arch package is packaged by the arch maintainers. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/discord
The maintainers of the PKGBUILD are all arch maintainers, which just downloads the generic
.tar.gzfile discord provides and puts it in all the places you need for you.The “official” arch packages are just PKGBUILDs like the AUR, except prebuilt, managed (and signed) by the arch team.
I didn’t know, thanks! I guess in hindsight I meant “official” as in, it’s not just some rando, I can trust it won’t break, and I don’t have to manually download the stuff every time xD
Yep! All those things are true, but it’s due to the hard work of the archlinux team and not discord doing anything valuable. The debian/ubuntu/etc team could probably repackage the tar.xz or include the deb file in their official repos if they wanted. They just don’t. And given how simple the workaround is, i don’t really blame them. Debian isn’t going to ship something that will require constant updating to work with remote servers, and ubuntu probably just wants you to use a snap anyway.
The archlinux team is just pretty cool.
I have checked on every new update because their fuckass client apparently can’t update itself in big 2025 and instead just opens your browser to the download url because that’ll convince people that Linux is great.
Updating itself isn’t really the Linux way of things. The Linux way is to have a centralised place like pacman or apt and to download everything at once. Every app having their own download and update system sounds like a nightmare.
apt and apt-get both use dpkg internally, but these days it’s essentially seen as an implementation detail that regular users don’t need to know about.
dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies (that’s a feature of apt) which means that if you install a Debian package with dpkg, you’ll have to manually install all dependencies first, and they won’t be marked as automatically installed (so autoremove won’t remove them if they’re not needed any more). Using apt solves that.
The web suggests dpkg because either the articles are old, or they’re based on outdated knowledge :)
@fluckx@lemmy.world
Usually installing a manually downloaded package and its dependencies works like this:
# dpkg -i package-file.deb# apt-get -f installSo apt-get can be used to install missing dependencies afterwards while marking them as automatically installed.
That works, but why do that when you could just do
apt install ./package-file.deb?Sure, but as I understood, the question was how to do that “properly” with dpkg and apt-get, i.e. without the ‘new’ apt script.