Atom PPA not found in Ubuntu 19

Question

I am trying to install Atom on Ubuntu 19. I started by adding the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atom

But it says not found. Any workaround? I know there is a snap, that is not what I am looking for.

Answer 1

On the Launchpad page for that PPA, under Overview of published packages, the most recent release the PPA contains packages for is Bionic, which is the codename for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. So Orhan G. Hafif is correct that the PPA doesn't currently support 19.04 and that you should follow the official Atom installation instructions instead. Also, the PPA's own description on that Launchpad page advises:

Please use the official repository instead: https://flight-manual.atom.io/getting-started/sections/installing-atom/#platform-linux

Since the PPA maintainers no longer recommend people use the PPA, it seems likely that they won't add packages to it for newer Ubuntu releases.

To summarize the first recommended approach in the official instructions (with some minor changes that are effectively stylistic):

1. Add the signing key so APT will know to trust the repository:

   wget -qO - https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
   

2. Add the repository:

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

3. Update the information APT stores about what packages are available from what repositories and, assuming that succeeds, install the atom package:

   sudo apt update && sudo apt install atom
   

   If you want the beta version of Atom, then install the atom-beta package instead of the atom package.

I suggest taking a look at the official instructions and not merely working from this post (though it should be fine either way).

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If for some reason you don't want to do that and also don't want to use the snap package, you can search Launchpad for other PPAs; just keep in mind that not every package with atom in its name is related to the Atom text editor. But you might not find a PPA that is current, that you trust, and that supports your Ubuntu release.

Though I don't especially recommend this, you can attempt to install Atom from the .deb file provided on the website, atom.io. It can be downloaded from the link there or on this page, where the file you want is atom-amd64.deb. This will only work if you're running a PC or Mac with a 64-bit processor. (It does not need to be an AMD processor, though.) Note also that, if you install it this way, you won't get automatic updates to newer versions of Atom.

If you do manually install from a downloaded .deb file, one good way is to use gdebi, which takes care of installing any missing dependencies. You'd do that by running sudo gdebi atom-amd64.deb in the directory where you downloaded atom-amd64.deb. But again, this is probably not the best way.