The popular Kodi media player (formerly XBMC) finally discontinued its official PPA for Ubuntu users.
Meaning that there’s no official Kodi .deb package any more. Users are recommended to use Flatpak package instead!
Ubuntu PPA is a popular way to host up-to-date versions of software packages in .deb package format. And, Wolfgang Schupp has been maintaining the Kodi Team PPA for many years for Ubuntu users. The last version stuck at Kodi 20.2, though there are still add-on updates now and then.
Now, the developer team officially announced the discontinuation of the PPA:
“The Team Kodi PPA has long been a staple for Ubuntu (and similar) users wishing to use more recent, and less adulterated, versions of Kodi.
It is with sadness that the team has come to a decision to officially retire the PPA due to the overhead of maintaining it.“
Image from Kodi website
Since the PPA is only for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and their based systems, the developer team decided to focus on Flatpak package, which runs in most Linux distributions using a sandbox environment.
Install & Update Kodi via Flatpak package
For Debian, Ubuntu, and their based systems, simply launch a terminal window (press Ctrl+Alt+T on Ubuntu), then run the 2 commands below one by one can install the media player as Flatpak:
- First, run command to enable Flatpak support:
sudo apt install flatpak
Other Linux can follow the official setup guide to get the daemon package.
- Then, use the command below can install Kodi Flatpak package in most Linux:
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/tv.kodi.Kodi.flatpakref
Finally, launch Kodi from either start menu or Gnome app grid depends on your desktop environment (log out and back in if app icon not visible).
And, to update the software package, use command:
flatpak update tv.kodi.Kodi
Uninstall Kodi Flatpak package
To uninstall the software package, also launch a terminal window and run command:
flatpak uninstall tv.kodi.Kodi
To remove the leftover data use flatpak uninstall --delete-data, and also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time libraries.
