And Martin Wimpress is back to his old ways. He stepped down as lead designer of the Ubuntu desktop long before Ubuntu 22.04 was released, but remains on the team as the Ubuntu MATE project lead. Who would have thought, because lately he is doing things that seem to go against Canonical. When he hasn't even been a month since he presented unsnap, a tool that converts snap packages to flatpak, has now introduced deb-get, though this tool doesn't seem as much of a frontal attack as the aforementioned unsnap.
As Wimpress describes in the GitHub page of the software, deb-get is "an apt-get functionality for DEB files published in third party repositories or by direct download. Works on Ubuntu and derivative distributions«. For those of you familiar with the Winget function from the latest versions of the Windows installer, deb-get works more or less the same way: if it's published on one of the supported platforms, it will install the DEB without us having to find the file ourselves and install it. us via terminal or graphical tool.
deb-get can be installed… like before deb-get existed
It is somewhat surprising that one of the ways to install deb-get is exactly how we install third-party DEBs right now: downloading the file from this link and installing it. If we prefer to do it from the terminal, we will open a window of it and write.
Once installed, installing software is much like how we did it before you could just use "apt" to install software: for example, we can type sudo deb-get install google-chrome-stable to install the Google web browser. The best thing about all this is that we won't need to add the repositories of the software it finds, so it will be more difficult for there to be any failure when loading them and the loading itself will also be faster. Between the options we can use with deb-get we have:
- update : reindex the packages.
- upgrade - Installs a newer version of an installed package.
- install – Install the package.
- reinstall - Reinstall the package.
- remove and purge: identical to their use in apt.
- clean: cleans the local repository, which has nothing to do with the official ones.
- search - Search for a package.
- show: shows information about a packet.
- list: List the packages available via deb-get.
- prettylist: list of packages available via deb-get, but in a more visually appealing format.
- cache: show the contents of the deb-get cache.
Wimpress says that the reason for creating deb-get is that third-party repositories exist, and always will. He also says that there are many who support DEB packages but can't get them added to the official repositories or can but update later. with this tool everything will be faster and more comfortable. Well welcome.