SUMMARY Package telegram-desktop on the KDE Neon has broken dependencies and cannot be installed from the Discover, where it is prominently shown. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Press install in Discover on official Telegram package from the ubuntu-bionic-universe 2. Get an info about problems with dependency As apt shows, telegram-desktop needs qtbase-abi-5-9-5, while the package has now name libqt5core5a
I can confirm this on User Edition: Operating System: KDE neon 5.14 KDE Plasma Version: 5.14.2 Qt Version: 5.11.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.51.0
This package is from Ubuntu not KDE neon. In KDE neon only care about KDE software. This package uses Qt internal ABI which changes with each release of Qt. As we have an updated Qt in neon so telegram-desktop won't work and can't be installed. It's a poor user experience I understand and it would be good to find some way of hiding these packages.
FYI - You could though, install this via flatpak or snap to bypass the issue. I tested the flatpak successfully.
Yes, flatpak version works correctly. The problem is that Discover shows the Telegram from Ubuntu repos amongst the recommended software. For the non-technical users, beginners, it could be very confusing. So the actual problem lies in KDE Software: Discover recommending non-installable app.
Discover doesn't recommend anything. It relies on the distro having sane packages. If the distro provides broken packages, it's the distro's fault. If the distro maintainers say that they don't care about this package being broken because their focus is on something else, that that may be a sign that you're not using the right distro. :) That said, IMHO we should somehow fix this in Neon anyway, Jonathan. The KDE Slimbook ships with Neon by default, so like it or not, people are using Neon as a production distro. The response of, "we don't care about making sure non-KDE apps work" is likely to become less and less tenable as Neon's popularity grows over time. If we can't fix this, then yes, we should hide the deb package for Telegram so that Discover only shows the Snap and/or Flatpak version.
Some time later, the situation is still unchanged (KDE Neon 5.26). What still lead me here is that the non-working "sudo apt install telegram-desktop" actually is described explicitly for KDE Neon in https://community.kde.org/Telegram So did it work and then break again?
In Neon, non-KDE apps are expected to be acquired using Snap or Flatpak. I believe that getting them from the distro repos is explicitly unsupported.