dpkg – How to install Scratch 2 on Ubuntu 16.10. or 17.04 (64bit)? – Ask Ubuntu

Today my daughter asked me to install Scratch.

But not the tablet. I already did it. On the computer. I tought it was a breeze.

Actually it was as simple as “sudo apt install scratch“. Too bad I got an oldish 1.4 version and her book refers to version 2.0.

To make a long story short, they relied on the piece of rotting proprietary software known as “Adobe AIR”.

There are several guides on how to install it on Linux too, but the one I found to actually work is in a comment of

dpkg – How to install Scratch 2 on Ubuntu 16.10. or 17.04 (64bit)? – Ask Ubuntu

which works also on Debian.

You can find it also at page 2 while we wait for  Scratch 3.

Luckily they realized that relying on proprietary software is quite a bad choice, as they are writing Scratch 3 using completely free software:

Scratch 3.0 will be written in HTML5, which is a general term for the latest HTML, CSS, and Javascript web-based markup and programming languages. Scratch 3.0 will primarily use the WebGL, Web Workers, and Web Audio Javascript libraries.^[4] Javascript is a widely supported language across all web browsers, and WebGL was picked for its speed and ability to perform operations like “touching color”. Unlike Adobe Flash, Javascript works without requiring any browser extensions.

I found it looking for its sources

The Scratch 3.0 source code is in GitHub. it is from some different source, but everything is written by JavaScript.

If you cannot get the sources for a software you’re never free, you’re shackled and enslaved to someone’s else will.