 The most popular family of Linux distributions, I would say is easily the Debian base slash Ubuntu based distributions, right? There's hundreds of these things out there. I would venture to say that probably 90% plus of desktop Linux users are using a Debian or Ubuntu based distribution. The Debian family of distributions is very popular. But one of the problems with Debian and Ubuntu based distros is Debian, typically people are basing off a Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS, which is based off a Debian stable. And sometimes the repository of software is not, it's not quite up to date, right? Because Debian only sees a release every couple of years, the Ubuntu LTS releases, they only see a new release every two years. And if you have newer programs that haven't been out that long, they're not going to be in the repository. But the great thing about these Debian based and Ubuntu based distributions and their popularity is people are trying to improve the situation. Here in the last few months, I've seen a lot of work on new package management tools, especially for Ubuntu and Debian. We've seen things like the Nala package manager, which I did a video on just a couple of weeks back, Pacstall, which is a AUR for Ubuntu, which was a really cool concept. I did a video on Pacstall here a few weeks back as well. And today I've discovered a new tool that's out there. This tool is called DebGit. You can see the source code for DebGit. It is on GitHub. It is free and open source software licensed under the MIT license. You can see the author is Wimpy's world. So that is Martin Wimpress. Martin Wimpress is the lead dev of Ubuntu Monte. And it looks like everything is written in shell script. If I go down, you can see contributors, languages, 100% shell. So this is a shell script here. So what does DebGit do? Well, it provides apt-get functionality for .debs published in third-party repositories or via direct download. So what this means is there's a .deb file somewhere on the internet, right? It's a third-party deb file. So it's not something that's published in the Debian repos or the Ubuntu repos. Typically, you would have to go grab that Debian file yourself and then install it either through the command line or through a graphical program such as Gdebi. But this DebGit program can actually go and grab those things for you, download them for you, install them for you. That's really cool. So I haven't actually used this yet. It looks like the installation is simply install curl because curl is not installed by default on some distributions. I don't believe it is installed by default on Ubuntu. And then with the curl command, you actually run the installation here. So let me go ahead and run through a quick installation of this. So I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the desktop here. So this is a virtual machine of Ubuntu 22.04. And I'm going to go ahead and open a terminal. Let's make it full screen and let me zoom way in here. Now, this is not a new VM. I've had it for a while, so I bet I have already installed curl before. So I'm going to do a where is curl. And you can see there is the location of the curl binary, meaning the executable. So it's installed for me. But if it wasn't, I would do a sudo apt install curl. But again, I already have it. And next we run this curl command, which is going to go and grab the dev get script and install it on our system. And it's going to ask for a sudo password. And typically you don't want to install programs using the curl command for safety reasons, unless you actually know what the script is going to do. In this case, it's from a well-respected developer in the community, Martin Wimpress. I trust his script installing it through curl. But I wouldn't go and grab just any random script by someone that you didn't know off the internet and then install it via curl because sometimes those scripts could do malicious things to your machine. So we've got dev get installed. I'm going to go back to the browser and let's look at usage. So they give us an example of how to use dev get to install a package. They have this example, dev get install Google Chrome stable. So that's an interesting example, Google Chrome. Why would Google Chrome need to be installed through a third party Debian package? It's because Google Chrome is proprietary software. And by default, there is strictly free software in the Debian repositories. For example, Debian even calls itself Debian GNU slash Linux, right? They take that term, that moniker GNU slash Linux because Debian in difference to the free software foundation, the free software movement, you know, they really are about free software. They don't want proprietary software in their repositories. So you're not going to find things like Google Chrome and the repo. And the same thing for Ubuntu LTS as well. You're not going to find Google Chrome in the repository. Typically how you install Google Chrome on Debian or Ubuntu, you have to go find third party packages, snaps, flat packs, app images, or you use a PPA and Ubuntu. But with dev get, it already knows the location of a third party dev file that will install Google Chrome for you. And it will be actually an officially packaged Google Chrome dev because I believe dev get only accepts official packages. So it has to be somebody that's actually associated with Google Chrome and official maintainer. They won't just accept anybody in the community contributing something to dev get, which for safety reasons, I can appreciate. So if I scroll down a little bit, you can see there's some flags and options with dev get. You can do dev get update, upgrade, install, reinstall, remove, purge, clean, search. So a lot of the stuff you can do with your standard app to get command right, you can do with dev get. But if I keep scrolling down, they actually have a nice table of popular software that is already packaged for dev get. And I would rather not install anything that's proprietary. But here is free and open source software, Brave browser. Brave is not yet packaged in Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS. So you typically have to go and find a third party dev package for this. But now I could just do dev get install brave dash browser. And I believe I would have the brave browser. So let's try this dev get install brave dash browser. And of course, it's going to sync the repositories for us. And you can see it's already downloaded the brave browser. It's unpacking the brave browser. And it looks like the installation is completed. If I close this terminal, now let me hit the super key and do a search for Brave. And there is Brave. Let's go ahead and launch it. Set Brave as default. Sure, why not? Because I actually prefer Brave these days. So that is awesome. So this is actually one of the most popular browsers on the planet right now, Brave. It is exploded in popularity. And it's kind of unfortunate that in many distributions, unless you're on a rolling release distribution, Brave still hasn't made it in many Linux distributions or repositories. But at least for your Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions, Debian now makes installing the brave browser dead simple. So let me open a terminal again with Control Alt T because Ubuntu has the terminal keybited to Control Alt T. And let me zoom way in once again. And now let me try one more package. Debian install code. Just because I know this is a very popular program that a lot of people want to install, I will warn you, technically, VS Code, you can go find the code on GitHub somewhere. Microsoft puts it out there and it's licensed under the MIT license. But technically, the installation of VS Code, most people are gonna do, which is the official packages from Microsoft, which I'm pretty sure Deb yet is probably using an official.Deb because that's what they're trying to package. They don't want just anybody in the community packaging these things. This will actually be proprietary software because technically the Microsoft packages of VS Code have a proprietary license. I know it's a little weird because is VS Code free software? Is it proprietary software? It's both. If you can pilot yourself, it's free software. If you accept the Microsoft package VS Code, that's actually proprietary software. So I just installed proprietary software even though I said I wasn't going to. But let's see if VS Code works. So let me launch it. And this will be the very first time I've ever launched VS Code. I have never actually looked at this program, never installed it because, again, it's been proprietary software for years. They recently open sourced it, although technically, again, this binary that's distributed is licensed under a proprietary license. If you want to free an open source VS Code, I believe there is a fork called VS Codeium that is 100% true free and open source software. But it looks like the Brave browser and VS Code work just fine installed through DeadGit. Some of the other proprietary packages, especially because, again, you won't find proprietary software in the standard repos. Microsoft Office is here. Discord was here. Of course, Google Chrome we've mentioned was here. It looks like Skype is here. Slack is here. Spotify is here. Sublime Text is here. All proprietary software. TeamViewer is here. And Vivaldi is here as well. So you've got a lot of your big proprietary programs that are very popular available for a very quick installed DeadGit install name of program. So how does DeadGit actually know where to go grab these .deb files? How does it know how to install them? Well, let's take a look at the source code. So the source code for DeadGit, this is the actual binary. This is the script, right? Dev-get. And if I take a look at it, and I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but I'm just gonna scroll down and really what I'm looking for is something that resembles a package build. And right here, function-dev-discord. This looks like the function that actually installs Discord. So if I did a .deb-get install Discord, it would run this function. And you can see it has this variable here, URL equals and the location to the discord.deb file. It also has variables for the app name, the official website, and a summary or description of the application. And you can see there's the function for quick emu, there's the function for installing virtual box, Firefox, ESR, NextCloud, the Atom text editor, and there's the VS code, which we just installed. Where did it go and grab that .deb file? It actually grabbed it from Microsoft.com. So being that that is the official Microsoft package, again, that is licensed under a proprietary license. For those that care, I care. I know a lot of people don't, but I just wanted to put that out there for information purposes. So it looks like contributing to .deb-get would be very easy. Again, they don't want just third party people that are not associated with these programs contributing to .deb-get. If you are actually an official maintainer of a project, you know, somebody that's part of an official team, right? You can actually contribute to .deb-get very easily. All you would need is to, I guess, submit one of these functions and with the variables, such as the URL variable, where do I go and grab the source code, that .deb file, and then give it a version number, a name, website, and a summary. So this is very, very easy. This is not complicated. A matter of fact, I would say this is a lot easier, even like arch package builds, which are not complicated either for anybody can contribute like to the AUR, for example. But this is really just a few variables that you would need to know. And then you could, of course, make a merge request here on this GitHub page for .deb-get. I don't know how welcoming they are to contributors. There is a contributing markdown file here. So let's actually read what is acceptable here. Software has to be published as a .deb, makes sense, right? So it's not trying to build things from source or build it from a tarball or anything like that, right? It has to be packaged in a Debian package. Software has to be published authoritatively by the upstream vendor project or a maintainer. Again, you need to be somebody that's officially part of that project to contribute here. Software must be actively maintained, that makes sense. Only stable production releases, so obviously no betas or nightly builds or anything like that. The GitHub releases and direct downloads must have a reliable means to dynamically determine the current upstream published version. And packages that replace components in the hardware enablement snacks, such as Linux kernel and Mesa will not be accepted, that makes sense. So you can tell by what they will accept. They're really going for stability and safety and security here, which I think makes total sense. I just think this is so incredibly useful. If I did DebGit help, it will actually give me a list of all the flags and options I know I only showed install, which is the most important. Obviously a DebGit remove would remove a program. I guess I could show that in action because honestly I'm never gonna use VS code. So let's do DebGit remove code. Give it my sudo password and VS code is no longer here. Let me do DebGit update, which is just going to sync the repositories I believe. And now let's do DebGit upgrade. And DebGit upgrade is upgrading the system. I haven't updated this machine in a while, this virtual machine. So I had a number of programs that needed to upgrade. So DebGit is really just a front end to the apt package manager. So DebGit upgrade I'm assuming is going to, of course, do all of our standard upgrades, but if the packages I installed with DebGit had an upgrade available, I'm assuming it would also upgrade those as well. Now it looks like the upgrade went just fine. If I did DebGit search name of package, similar to how you would do apt search name of package, would DebGit actually search like some of the third party dev files that DebGit can install? For example, code. And it returned two package names, code and shutter encoder, which of course shutter encoder has code as part of the name. Let's do DebGit search Google for Google Chrome. We know it's part of the package name, but there are a couple of other packages available through DebGit that also had Google as part of the name. I love this. I really think that Martin Wimpress outdid himself on this. I think this is a fantastic contribution to the DebGit community and to the Ubuntu community. I think you guys, if you're running DebGit based or Ubuntu based distributions should definitely install DebGit, because installing third party proprietary software, especially can be tricky. Typically what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to resort to using things like snap packages, flat packs, app images, and not everybody wants to install those because those are not managed by your package manager, the apt package manager, right? They're their own thing. They're from the different repository of software that has its own package manager, whether it be snap or flat pack or whatever it happens to be, where DebGit strictly installs .deb packages, right? So they're all native Debian packages that the apt package manager will manage for you. And I think that's fantastic. Given the choice of installing the Brave browser through a snap or through DebGit using a Debian package, I would choose DebGit every single time. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe James Mett, Maxim Mimit, Michael Mitchell, Paul West, Wanya Ball, Homie Allen, Armor Dragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid Diokai, Dylan Gregg, Marshram Erion, Alexander Paul, Peace Arch and Fedora, Polytech Realities, for Les Red Prophet, Steven, Tools Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about DebGit would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like DebGit, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. DebGit eliminates the need for a lot of snaps.