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Douwe
Asked: 2020-10-26 03:46:19 +0800 CST

Atom text editor gone after update to 20.10, error: Depends: gvfs-bin but it is not installable

  • 772

Today I succesfully upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10. However, I noticed that the Atom text editor that I use was gone after the update. So, I tried installing it using sudo apt install atom. That didn't work and threw the following error:

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 atom : Depends: gvfs-bin but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Does this mean that I upgraded to 20.10 too soon and that Atom does not support it yet? I tried a few things, like

  • Reinstalling gvfs-bin;

    Package gvfs-bin is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source

    E: Package 'gvfs-bin' has no installation candidate

  • apt clean, apt autoremove, apt install --fix-broken, apt install -f

apt atom

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The package gvfs-bin package has been dropped by Ubuntu in 20.10. It won't be added later. It won't be supported.

    The reason is that it's deprecated. See the package description:

    This package contains deprecated command-line tools such as gvfs-copy and gvfs-rename. Please use the gio(1) tool in the libglib2.0-bin package instead.

    Since there is no atom package in the Ubuntu repositories, there was no reason to keep gvfs-bin. Contact the upstream Atom project and let them know that their software has an obsolete dependency and is no longer installable.

    The gvfs-bin package remains in all supported releases before and including 20.04. Consider remaining on 20.04, or running a 20.04 VM or Container.

    Alternately, you can try downloading the package and trying to install it on a newer system. However, that is unsupported. If you encounter problems, you're on your own. Our only advice will be to uninstall the wrong-version package.

    ...or you can skip all the deb dependencies entirely and just install the Snap instead.

    • 8

  2. Could not install atom 1.52.0 on ubuntu 20.10 either. Even the deb file from the site (atom.io) fails with software install with a (unspecified) software dependencies error. Here are two ways that do work for now :

    snap install atom --classic

    Or visit atom.io, download and install the beta version (1.53.0-beta0) using software install.

    I opted for the beta.

    • 3

  3. The problem is fixed in the beta builds

    apt install atom-beta

    Edit: before runnign the command above you have to add Atom PPA to your system. From the official instructions:

    curl -sL https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -

    Then setup the repository:

    sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any/ any main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/atom.list'
sudo apt-get update
    • 2

  4. Today atom version 1.53.0 was released. The dependency to gvfs-bin package was removed in this version. This is explained in the release notes and here.

    You can install the deb package as explained on their web site.

    I removed the atom-beta package and installed the normal atom package. It works as expected.

    • 2