Questions about installing the spotify client on Debian

[jaytelford]

Plan

Premium

Country

United Kingdom

Device

Laptop HP Pavilion

Operating System

Description: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster).  Release: 10

My Question or Issue

The instructions for installing Spotify on Linux, that can be found here: https://www.spotify.com/is/download/linux/ refer to using apt-get and, although the key is retrieved from a secure address, the repository is being served over http.

1.  Why are we being told to use apt-get instead of just apt?

2.  Why is the repo not being served over https?

I am asking this because newer versions of Debian use apt and not apt-get - although apt-get can be used, apt is the prefered method on newer Debian releases.  Is there a specific reason why we are being told to use apt-get and not just apt?

Lastly, is there a secure link for the repo?

Also, as a very last thought, can you provide a way to download the source from GitHub or somewhere, so that we can build the app from source and then install it ourselves using apt to pull in dependencies?

Thanks.

[dlu]

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1.  Why are we being told to use apt-get instead of just apt?

... newer versions of Debian use apt and not apt-get - although apt-get can be used, apt is the prefered method on newer Debian releases.  Is there a specific reason why we are being told to use apt-get and not just apt?

Why does that matter? I suspect that the site mentions apt-get because this has always worked and still works, so why bother and change it. Besides, your statement is only partially true. man apt:

apt ... is intended as an end user interface.

Inside scripts, apt-get is still recommended over apt.

2.  Why is the repo not being served over https?

... is there a secure link for the repo?

The certificate for repository.spotify.com does not match the domain, so no. However, Debian repositories themselves are not served via https either, so spotify does not anything unusual here.

[ArtGravity]

At the time the directions were originally written, apt had not replaced apt-get as the standard Debian package management command.  There are numerous current installation guides for all manner of packages online that still reference apt-get instead of apt. As @dlu pointed out, apt-get still performs as expected, so the directions still work, which is utlimately the most important thing.

Snap has been the preferred installation method for over two years now. I haven't bothered with the apt version in about that long. It took me a bit to warm up to it since I had been using the apt version for years, but now that I have the snap running Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSUSE, I'm unlikely to ever switch back to the apt version.

The Spotify package isn't open source software, so publishing the source code on Github simply cannot happen.

[spocon]

There is a new project for a spotify client on Debian and Raspberry PI :

It includes a Spotify GUI as well

more information see here