Type of site Ubuntu Software Portal Owner João Pinto Commercial no | Available in English Created by João Pinto | |
Website www.getdeb.net www.playdeb.net | ||
GetDeb is an Ubuntu software portal providing newer versions of software included in Ubuntu, and software that is omitted from the official repositories. PlayDeb is a sister project with an explicit focus on games. The names come from the .deb package format used by Ubuntu. GetDeb and PlayDeb services can also be used by Ubuntu derivatives.
Contents
Purpose
Standard Ubuntu releases receive support for nine months and LTS releases for five years. During this support lifetime, they will receive official security fixes, high-impact bug fixes and conservative, substantially beneficial low-risk bug fixes - but no completely new versions of applications.
GetDeb allows its users to receive more up-to-date versions of popular software without upgrading their whole OS or installing from source code.
Pros and cons
GetDeb and PlayDeb serve two primary purposes. They allow Ubuntu users to install software that is not yet included in the main repositories, and offer current versions of many packages that are included in the Ubuntu repositories. The latter is of utility because, due to the release cycle adopted by Ubuntu, most packages will be several months out of date at the time of release, and will not receive feature updates until the next discrete release for stability reasons.
It is generally advisable to subscribe only to Ubuntu's own package repositories where possible, as software offered by GetDeb and PlayDeb has not been extensively tested with the current Ubuntu release and may suffer stability issues. However, in many cases newer versions of software are only omitted from a specific Ubuntu release due to releases typically being static except for security updates. In some cases, software packaged by GetDeb and PlayDeb may be beta or alpha releases - and may also not conform to the Debian or Ubuntu packaging guidelines.
Alternatives
GetDeb and PlayDeb overlap somewhat in purpose with: