I can't see anything I am installing, can't find installed programs [closed]

I have installed a lot of debs and programs through apt get... it says i have these programs but I can't see them anywhere, what's going on? It says it's there... but where?

Edit: The problem may have been not restarting?

Solution 1:

Sometimes installed packages won't show up on your desktop until you log out and log back in.

Log out and back in or reboot to refresh your desktop.

Now, to list all installed applications, you can run dpkg with the -l or --list option:

dpkg -l

To narrow down the results, you can pipe dpkg to grep to search for a keyword like this:

dpkg -l | grep libreoffice

and you can use the which command to find out where the libreoffice command is installed:

which libreoffice

If you don't know the exact command to use, but you do know the first few letters of the command, like libre for example, you can press the TAB key to automatically finish the command for you. This feature is called "tab completion". If more than one command matches, a list of matching commands will print in the terminal after you press TAB two times.

Also, to list the location of all files installed for a package, you can use the -L or --listfiles option like in this example:

dpkg -L vlc 

Commands are usually installed under a bin directory but you don't need to know the location of the command file to run the command, you just need to know the name.

Additionally, if you don't want to keep the terminal open after you run a command, you can use an ampersand after the command like this:

vlc &

and then press ENTER a couple of times. If you see some output in the terminal, you can ignore it.

Finally, here are some similar commands.

First:

apt list

will list all installable packages.

apt --installed list

will list all installed packages.

The following example will search for and list available packages related to the search term gimp. Again, use grep to narrow down the results if you need to.

apt-cache search gimp

Similarly,

apt search gimp

will do almost the same thing.

Also,

apt show gimp

will show details about the package.