What's the best way to install software in Ubuntu?

"use aptitude search to search the software you want to install

use apt-get to install the software you founded in previous step"

Note that if you want more current versions than are available in your distribution, you can uncomment the "backports" lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list. Penalty: somewhat less stability and security, since your specific combination of packages may not have been tested together.

"You need a different last-ditch, just-before-old-school thing to try. Synaptec, aptitude and apt-get are all great tools but they use the same installation process: search (generally) remote repositories, check dependencies, download files, and install the package(s). The package manager they're all built upon is dpkg.

Sometimes you need to shoehorn a package in manually, in which case you'll download a .deb file and run this:

dpkg -i mypackage.deb

So that's your option 3. Naturally there are lots of options to help force a package to be installed despite missing dependencies, but they can be a pain.

Option 4 remains the old-school approach, with the caveat that they should always be installed under /usr/local, under /opt, or in a home directory -- since they aren't part of the package system, a later package install could overwrite them, so keep them out of the typical system directories if possible."

"Installing through the repositories via Synaptic, aptitude and apt-get is recommended because if any packages in the repos get updated, then those updates will push through to your system.

Applications under constant development however will only have the latest stable build in the repos, and if you like more up-to-date versions (that include serious bug-fixes for example), the application website usually offers a downloadable .deb setup package.

Some applications only offer source code tar.gz downloads, but usually include instructions for compiling the source. As snicker said this is only for about 5% of them.

If you are looking for games specifically, playdeb.net has an installable package (.deb) that integrates your web browser into their site, allowing easy one-click installation off a game page. This is still in beta, and although advertised for Jaunty and up, it installed fine on my Intrepid system too."