Can’t Install Third-Party Apps on Ubuntu 16.04? You’re Not Alone

ou, my friend, are far from alone.

A huge number of you have pinged us about a big ol’ bug in the Xenial Xerus’ new Software app. A bug that leaves you unable to install popular apps like Steam, Google Chrome, and Nylas N1, using .deb files.

Double-clicking on a .deb installer opens the Software app as expected, but clicking the ‘install’ button does nothing.

A bug report has been lodged for the issue (link at the bottom) and explains that the issue: “…only seems to happen with third-party packages; installing a random deb from packages.ubuntu.com/xenial worked.”.

Richard, one of the (awesome) folks who gave us a heads-up about the bug, isn’t impressed though, telling us that he thinks: “it’s pretty sad that this happened for an LTS release, there are tons of users complaining about it.