How To: Install Eclipse On Ubuntu 20.04

Today’s article will tell you how to install Eclipse on Ubuntu 20.04. Though I suppose that, technically, it was tested on Lubuntu. Still, it should work for any Ubuntu official flavor and probably any derivatives. 

Eclipse is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Java. I’m pretty sure it’s number one in that role, or really close to it. It’s also useful for other programming languages, so I thought I’d check it out. It’s actually just a couple of commands to install Eclipse on Ubuntu, but it can be a little confusing, and I figured I’d document it here. 

I didn’t spend all that long using it, as I’m not really a Java dev, but I did look around and I can see why it’s popular. It’s fairly intuitive and there’s a plugin for anything you can think of. Seriously, there’s a lot of plugins – like ~1500 of them. I’m a bit under the weather, so you get what you get today.

Not being a Java developer, and mostly just being curious, I really can’t say that it’s a good IDE. But, it did look intuitive – things were where I expected to find them – and there’s a robust community surrounding it. On top of that, the list of plugins is huge and there were plugins to cover a lot. So, you might as well take a look if you’re looking for an IDE. This is programming software, so its popularity is almost certainly deserved and for good reason.

Install Eclipse On Ubuntu:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Usually, you just install stuff from the Snap Store and that’s it. Installing Eclipse is actually a little different. It’s actually written in Java and  so will need a JRE. That’s not actually included in the Snap. That right there kinda makes me wonder about how well Snaps will fill their roles into the future – as being complete packages is one of the Snap goals.

sudo apt install default-jre

That was it. That was the ‘trick’. You can now install an up-to-date Snap version (as there have been older versions in the default repositories and PPAs). To install via Snap, you just:

sudo snap install --classic eclipse

Once that has run its course, you can test the Eclipse IDE to see if it’s what you need in your programming tool-chain. It wasn’t all that hard and you should now have the most recent Eclipse installed. The Snap should stay updated regularly, much more regularly than the old repository way. So, there’s that. Which is nice.

Closure:

And there you have it. This article is nice and easy, and short! It’s also one more said and done, thankfully. I was feeling a bit icky when I wrote this one, so it’s definitely not a great article – but it is an article!

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