I mentioned a bit ago that I was having an issue trying to help my parents upgrade install Zoom on their machine. I decided to trek on over there while getting my latest prescription to see what was going on. It didn't take long. I clicked on the .deb package and was greeted with the Software Install program. Unfortunately the "Install" button never appeared. Curious, I brought up a terminal and installed the updated package with dpkg -i zoom_amd64.deb.

It was subtle but I realized the issue right away. There was an additional library that needed installing.

Once dpkg completed I did an apt install -f and everything was right in the world.

Why couldn't the Software Install program do its magic? Beats me. At the very least you'd think that it would bring up a dialog box saying that it'd need to install additional packages, but no such luck.

Now, I could try filing a bug report on this. And maybe in 10 years time someone can mark it as WONTFIX because someone doesn't think this is a problem (not to mention the crop of whuffie-seeking volunteer bug triage folks asking "is this still an issue" along the way).

There used to be an adage in the Ubuntu community: if we have to drop to the command line we've failed. Somewhere that ethos has been lost. Perhaps we need a refresher.