When you wish to attempt a brand new app in your cellphone, you open your app retailer and set up the app. It’s easy, fast, and environment friendly. In this mannequin of offering purposes, cellphone distributors make sure that you already know precisely the place to go to get an app, and that builders with apps to distribute know the place to place their apps so individuals can discover them.
Before telephones used this progressive mannequin of software program distribution, Linux was utilizing it within the type of “software repositories.” As the time period implies, these had been locations on the Internet the place purposes had been uploaded so Linux customers might flick through them, and set up them, from a central location. The time period obtained shortened to only “repo” (for “repository,” not “reposession”), however whether or not you name it a repo, app retailer, software program middle, bundle supervisor, or no matter else, it is a good system and has served Linux desktop customers nicely for a number of a long time.
The backside line is that putting in apps on Linux is lots like putting in apps in your cellphone. If you have accomplished one, you are able to do the opposite.
[ Download our eBook: A guide to installing applications on Linux ]
Software
On the GNOME desktop, your view into your desktop’s software program repository is an software referred to as, merely, Software. You can consider this software as a particularly particular internet browser. It’s software program that is obtainable to put in from the Internet, gathering all the pieces obtainable into classes, and displaying it to you in your desktop.
From the beginning display, you’ve got just a few choices.
- Search for an software you are already aware of. To do that, click on the magnifying glass icon within the high left nook of the window.
- Browse by class. These are discovered on the backside of the window.
- Browse by current and suggestions. These are listed within the animated banner and the icons under it.
When you click on on an software that appears fascinating to you, a function web page opens so you’ll be able to see screenshots and skim a brief description of the software program.
Installing an app
Once you have discovered software program you wish to set up, click on the Install button on the high of the appliance function web page.
Once it is put in, the Install button adjustments to a Launch button, so you’ll be able to optionally launch the app you have simply put in.
If you do not wish to launch the app simply now, you’ll be able to at all times discover it in your Activities menu together with all the opposite purposes you have already got in your pc.
Getting extra apps from extra locations
Your Linux desktop has purposes packaged particularly for it, however in in the present day’s world there’s quite a lot of open supply occurring far and wide. You can get extra purposes by including “third party” repositories to your desktop’s app retailer. Of course, all of those phrases aren’t precisely appropriate: what’s a “third party” in a world the place software program is being created by everybody anyway, and what’s an app retailer when nothing prices any cash? Terminology apart, one standard third-party repo is Flathub.org.
To add one other supply of apps to your Linux desktop, you primarily “install” a location into your app retailer. For Flathub, you obtain the Flathub repository file and set up it with GNOME Software, simply as if it had been an app. It’s not an app. It’s a supply of apps, however the course of is identical.
Find out extra
It would not be Linux if there weren’t a dozen different methods to carry out any given activity. Flexibility is constructed into the system with Linux, so whereas GNOME Software supplies one straightforward method to get apps, there are many different methods, together with set up scripts, set up wizards, AppImages, and naturally compiling instantly from supply code. You can get data on all of those set up strategies from our new eBook, Installing Applications on Linux. It’s free, so give it a learn.
