I want to manage all installed applicatons, both installed through app center and manually installed from outside app center.
The default App Center application itself is very good and its features are very easy to use, but the installed application management only displays those installed through the app center, while the applications that I manually installed from outside are not listed. I know I can use terminal with the command “apt list --installed” but it’s complicated, I have to scroll through many packages to find the name of the installed application that I am looking for.
This is not about an application with a custom PPA, but an application installed from a .deb file, how to install it is very simple, just right click on the .deb file then select open with app center, and just click install, done. but to uninstall you have to go to the terminal.
For example here I installed app for video editing called “Lightworks”, it does show on settings apps list but not on App Center installed apps management.
A package you install from downloading a .deb file and manually installing isn’t updated with Apt Center since App Center has no information where it came from.
Sometimes, these downloaded packages can themselves check for new versions and install them. If not, you have to go back to the source and see if there is a newer version to download.
Showing up in your installed apps only requires that a .desktop file is found on your system.
You could use Gnome Software instead of App Center if you are using any Flatpaks, as it will manage those in addition to .deb and snaps from the repositories.
I have used synaptic before apt center existed & still use it. I like it as I get actual name of app to install or uninstall via command line. Even though I now use Kubuntu, I install this gtk app.
Synaptic is a graphical package management tool based on GTK+ and APT.
Synaptic enables you to install, upgrade and remove software packages in
a user friendly way.
sudo apt install synaptic
Allows search, has subcategories & shows installed apps, version.
If you know the path and name of one file from a deb-package, then dpkg-query --search /path/to/the/file
will give you the name of the package, e.g. dpkg-query --search /bin/ls will print “coreutils: /bin/ls”.
Edited the title to more accurately reflect the scope of the problem: Non-repo .deb packages
“All installed applications,” the original phrasing, is much broader, and would include snaps, binaries, tarballs, flatpaks, containers, and a wide variety of more exotic methods. Each having a different method of management.
thanks for the suggestion, I’ve used that command, but it’s a bit tricky for me, considering I’m not too familiar with the terminal, I’ve only been using Linux for 4 months. That’s why I like Ubuntu because it’s very user friendly, so I want to avoid the terminal as much as possible to avoid user errors.
