Hi All,

I'm new to neon and ubuntu, longtime RHEL/fed user.
I'm setting up a new laptop for a non-technical user and decided on Neon.

Everything looks and works great, kudos neon team.

I read in more than one place that .debs are preferred for speed and environment recognition over the snap or flatpak alternatives so
I used "apt-get install" to install google chrome and libreoffice and everything looks good, the apps are visible in the launcher and start up just fine.

My issue however is that they do not show up under "installed" in discover. This seems off to be, especially for google chrome because after installing this, it creates a sources file and the source does show up in the discover settings page.

Fresh install and now I'm ready to necessary applications but have a couple questions before i go too far this time.

1. Should I not be installing using apt-get / dpkg method on neon?
2. when click on "up to date" in discover, will it update these packages or will i need to do this manually using "sudo pkcon refresh && sudo pkcon update" ?
3. (off topic) is there any way to select a bunch of software (check boxes) , i.e. gimp, cheese, pdfmod, and have it all install at one time as opposed to having to click install on each package.
4. Some things i cant even see in discover, openssh-server, ubuntu-restricted-extras to name a couple, is this by design?

I'm trying to minimise administration tasks for this user that will have no idea how to update/install software from the command line (even synaptic would probably scare him.)

Thanks in advance.

1- you can most definitely be using apt/dpkg to manage your system, when used properly . Discover, like Gnome Software, is not a distro-specific tool, and thus uses Packagekit to do the work under the hood, which is actually using the system's native packaging tools to do the actual work. You aren't doing any harm by 'mixing' tools, because you actually are using the exact same things in the end.

2 - These both do the exact same thing. Pkcon is just the command line interface to Packagekit. In the end, this is using your distro's native packaging tools to update the system -- sudo apt update and then sudo apt full-upgrade. Pkcon used in Fedora or Rhel would be running the analogous commands appropriate in those systems to perform the same tasks.

3 - In Discover, no. But there are other tools available that have more 'advance' features, such as Synaptic or Muon, These are full GUI package managers.

4 - Yes. Discover, much like Gnome Software is an 'app store' sort of tool, not a package manager, so not everything will show up in it - non-GUI things, system libraries, etc.

I would recommend Muon (which you can install using Discover).