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Comment on Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

Because in 20+ years of off and on using linux, I’ve never once gotten apt to install anything. I have however fucked up my whole system by doing sudo apt update/sudo apt upgrade.

Sorry but that’s really not typical, you must have been doing something out of the ordinary or been very unlucky.

I didn’t say I want to know why it needs them. I’m upset it tells me that it tells me it needs them, and then says “they won’t be installed”, but won’t tell me WHY they won’t be installed. If the program needs those dependancies, just install them. Instead it juat says “we know you need the dependancies, but we’re not going to do that”.

It’s the package manager that handles dependencies, not the program you’re trying to install. Random programs shouldn’t be able to just install things on your computer. Did you try installing the dependencies?

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Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Did you try installing the dependencies?

I have zero clue how to do that. I don’t even know what file extention they would be, or where I would get them, or what step 1 would be to installing them.

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- grue@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  They would also be .deb files. If you wanted to install package A.deb that depended on B.deb and C.deb, with C.deb itself depending on D.deb and E.deb, you would work down the dependency tree to figure that out, obtaining the .deb file for each package as you went, then run dpkg install E.deb, dpkg install D.deb, dpkg install C.deb, dpkg install B.deb, and finally dpkg install A.deb in that order.
  
  This is what apt is designed to do for you, automatically.
  
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poweruser@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

sudo apt update/sudo apt upgrade

It is actually very easy to break your install by doing this if you have made a habit of installing random .deb files from around the internet

APT can’t update things that are not in the repository and .deb files typically only work for a specific version of the OS (which is to say, they will probably work when you install them but break when you update).

You should in general never install a .deb file directly. Sometimes it might be necessary in order to install a program that the developer doesn’t support, but that lack of support should be a flashing warning light that the package will probably break something in the future.

There are ways to purge your system of orphaned .deb installs, and I suggest doing that before large upgrades

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