Is apps.ubuntu.com deprecated?

Solution 1:

Canonical have probably forgotten to update apps.ubuntu.com for the new current release Ubuntu 16.10 or the current LTS release Ubuntu 16.04. I can see no announcement anywhere that apps.ubuntu.com is deprecated, it seems to be some sort of mistake on their part.

Clearly, this is not a great experience, before you could choose to find packages on apps.ubuntu.com for the latest release of Ubuntu (in addition to command-line tools and packages.ubuntu.com), but now you can't. I think most people haven't noticed, because for apps that used to exist in the Ubuntu repositories and continue to exist (like Blender), everything still works as it should.

I've filed these two bug reports about it:

• Current Ubuntu release not in apps.ubuntu.com
• "firefox" is not found for Ubuntu 14.04 on apps.ubuntu.com

Solution 2:

Ubuntu Apps Directory is deprecated.

All searches to Ubuntu Apps Directory no longer connect to that website. Instead they are redirected to https://snapcraft.io/store. Even though Ubuntu 12.04 is currently an End Of Life release it is still possible to search for Ubuntu 12.04 packages using rmadison <package-name>. The rmadison program is provided by the devscripts package from the default Ubuntu repositories.

I've known about this since September, 2016, and now it is becoming apparent to the community that it's time to move on: What do we do about the links to apps.ubuntu.com?, and now two years later the consensus is that we should stop adding links to apps.ubuntu.com.

What follows was correct at the time that it was originally posted, but it is obsolete now that Ubuntu Apps Directory is no longer available.

Ubuntu Apps Directory only supports Ubuntu versions from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 13.10, all of which are End Of Life versions except for Ubuntu 12.04. Packages from more recent supported releases of Ubuntu can be searched for at Ubuntu Packages Search.

Ubuntu 14.04 is listed in the Ubuntu Apps Directory, but it's not searchable there. Instead it's searchable at Ubuntu Packages Search.

It's obvious from comparing Ubuntu Apps Directory with Ubuntu Packages Search that supported releases at Ubuntu Packages Search receive more support than unsupported releases at Ubuntu Apps Directory do, but I am not going to conjecture about whether this is by coincidence or by design or the reasons official or otherwise why this disparity exists.

In addition to searching for packages in all the currently supported releases, Ubuntu Packages Search also supports searching for packages from the second latest release even if that release is an EOL release, and sometimes it even supports searching for packages from the third latest release as well. For example in September, 2018 the gcc package from the second latest release, Ubuntu 17.10, can still be found at https://packages.ubuntu.com/artful/gcc as shown in the screenshot. This is useful when you need to download and install a missing package for 17.10 in order to upgrade it to 18.04, even if 17.10 is currently an End Of Life release.