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Maxence
Asked: 2019-11-12 07:46:16 +0800 CST

2 versions on the same software with different features [duplicate]

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I installed Darktable in the past through Ubuntu Software Center and it worked perfectly. However, in the Darktable preferences tab, OpenCL was not enabled.

I really want to have OpenCl enabled as it boosts Darktable's performance. Thus I made sure I had the correct NVIDIA driver that allows OpenCL configuration enabled and tried running darkatbe-cltest, which failed and showed this error message:

darktable-cltest not known 
You can install it with sudo apt install darktable

I was a bit confused, because I already had Darktable installed as described above.

But I did proceed with sudo apt install darktable, which installed a new version of Darktable on my computer.

I also used sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release, in order to update to the newer version. Oddly, this new version now supports OpenCL!

Now I have 2 different versions of Darktable on my computer, both version 2.6.2. However, one supports OpenCL, while the other does not. Also the layout of the two versions is slightly different (different font size and padding).

When I run Synaptic, I can only see one version of Darktable, the one installed from the terminal.

And when I try to find packages installed through Ubuntu Software Center, like Discord, I can't find them in Synaptic.

Because I thought Ubuntu Software Center was a GUI of the terminal, it is a bit strange not to find every package installed in Ubuntu Software Center.

(NB: I have to mention that I did run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt upgrade a few times and also updated through Synaptic some of the packages I saw there.)

software-center synaptic darktable 18.04

1 Answers

  1. Debian and Ubuntu apt-get, apt, synaptic (and maybe a bunch of others) provides software packages from repositories in the "old fashioned" way of using deb files (similar to redhat rpm files which has been around for long). These are easy to use, but installs software and libraries in the "old fashioned" way of adding them to the host operating system; which may break the entire OS if a bad mismatch occurs.

    Snap and the similar AppImage and Flatpak are other ways to install software, they differ in the way that the software ends up in a "container", with the feature that the container includes ALL software that is required to run the package (and thus "CANNOT" disturb the host OS). But this comes with the caveat that the container might need special settings - at least - to communicate with (or maybe use portions of) the actually installed operating system or hardware and it's files and/or libraries.

    E.g., to have a gimp snap package be able to print using CUPS provided by the host OS, a single

    sudo snap connect gimp:cups-control

    is required.

    If you do not provide that, or if there is no such adaptation the OS feature will not be available.

    I suspect this be the case with OpenCL in your situation.

    Related: What are the differences between snaps, appimage, flatpak and others?

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