This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.
If you want to contact me, I’m at /u/lvxferre@mander.xyz
Frankly in this case even a simple bash script would do the trick. Have it check your distro, version, and architecture; if you got curl and stuff like this; then ask you if you want the stable or beta version of the software. Then based on this info it adds Mullvad to your repositories and automatically install it.
It’s less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they’re explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.
Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.
Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it’s under “Installing the app without the Mullvad repository”. It’s a bad idea though; then you don’t get automatic updates.
A better way to do this is to tell your system “I want software from this repository”, so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.
but I have no idea what I’m doing here.
I’ll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.
sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mullvad-vpn
The first command boils down to “download this keyring from the internet”. The keyring is a necessary file to know if you’re actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but… it’s more work, come on.
The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don’t use Ubuntu but there’s probably some GUI to do it for you.
The third command boils down to “hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me”.
The fourth one installs the software.
And then when you do show them a license in Spanish:
Then they eventually give Spanish up, because there’s too big of a chance that people will actually show them a license in Spanish regardless of the arbitrary restrictions that they might put. They go for Majorcan instead. No, licenses in Catalan or Valencian are not to be accepted, they must be in Majorcan and only Majorcan. As they learned from German tourists: “zi us ploi, full una zeaveza”. (They also buried some clauses 30m deep in the sand. A good thing that they didn’t need to dig the holes, the tourists did it for them.)
But there’s still some chance that someone might enforce copyleft against them, so they stick to Portuguese instead. It must be spoken loudly, and you need to use the right rhotic. They never say which, but no matter which you use you’re doing it wrong, be it [ɾ ɹ ɻ r h x χ ʁ ʀ ɣ], you’re doing it wrong and thus you can’t enforce it.
And at the end of the day they switch back to English, and then they start “ackshyually” to prove that the free license was actually costless (free as in free beer), not unchained (free as in free speech).
I like them, even for software installation. Partially because they’re lazy - it takes almost no effort to write a bash script that will solve a problem like this.
That said a flatpak (like you proposed) would look far more polished, indeed.