Future of my IntelliJ IDEA Ubuntu packages

2026-03-28

966 words, ~7 min reading time

First of all, I would like to apologise to everyone using my IntelliJ IDEA Ubuntu packages who I left in the dark for the last few months regarding the future of them given the merge of the two editions, Ultimate and Community, by JetBrains into a single product at the end of last year. Initially, I promised a solution by mid-January, then early February. Now, its the end of March.

Well, life happens. And during the last months a lot. After the always hectic Christmas time we moved to a new apartment in February and January was filled with preparations. To be honest, I'm still not as entirely on top of my tasks, and there is still a lot to do in the new place.

That's why it took me so long to sit down and write this blog post. Perhaps it was not only that but also the fact that the decision was not an easy one. To make it short: I have decided to not further maintain my IntelliJ IDEA packages. If you were a user, thank you very much for the trust you placed in me! If you were a contributor of any kind (code, issues, whatever): Thank you very much for taking the time helping with the project.

Now, I'd like to say a few words about my history of the project, the changes in the IntelliJ platform during these years, and the multiple reasons that lead my to my decision. Of course, you may browse on, if you are not interested. If you are searching for an alternative, read the last paragraph.

I started learning to program using Java back in 2013 and during the same time I also learned to use Linux and especially Ubuntu. In 2014, I started Android development and relied on a PPA by Paolo Rotolo for installing Android Studio on my machines. Since I not only developed Android apps, but still desktop Java applications, I also used Eclipse (don't ask why) and IntelliJ (Community Edition). In March 2015 (so about 11 years ago) I understood enough about Debian packaging to adopt Paolos work (thank you very much for that!) to first package Eclipse and then IntelliJ CE and provided a PPA for each of them. Later in 2015 I went to university and most programming courses were also in Java. So I kept packaging both for a while but was not using Eclipse any more. So in 2017 I stopped maintaining that package. But when I found out about the possibility of using IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate for free as a student, I also packaged that in February 2017.

Since then I have provided both IntelliJ IDEA editions as a rather hacky package using my intellij-idea PPA. Surprisingly, and without much more advertising than an answer to a Stack Overflow question, I realised that more and more people started using the package. So I kept maintaining them and automated the process bit by bit. In the beginning, almost everything was done manually (often with the help of some contributors), then a first script supported adjusting the files and later another script automated the whole upgrading process (including uploading to Launchpad). Finally, and after many delayed updates, I completely automated the process using the already existing scripts, a custom, automatically rebuilt Docker image and a GitLab CI pipeline.

Using the automation, I only needed to adjust the supported Ubuntu version periodically. And that made the whole process bearable. Mostly because since 2018 or 2019, I have not written a single line of Java code (or anything else supported by IntelliJ IDEA CE). Therefore, the motivation for investing time into the packages was never high. To be honest, fully automating the process was rather a learning opportunity for GitLab pipelines. However, everything worked with minimal manual interaction since 2021.

Fast-forward to 2025 JetBrains decided in July to unify both editions into a single product starting with version 2025.3. I have not used IntelliJ in such a long time that I cannot comment on that decision. But it was clear that this needs a significant change in how to package IntelliJ. What I needed to do was quite clear:

1. Create a new package intellij-idea
2. Transform the intellij-idea-community and intellij-idea-ultimate package to be transitional packages depending on intellij-idea
3. Output a warning of some sort if intellij-idea was not installed directly.

With that process in mind I created a "to do" in July 2025 for adjusting the packaging process. But I did not prepare anything and when the unified distribution was then released with 2025.3 on 2025-12-08 I knew, I need to act. However, about two weeks later, it became obvious, that I won't have time until mid of January 2026. Additionally, there was an issue raised by Danny Trunk on GitLab regarding a warning when installing the packages on Debian due to differences in verifying repository signatures compared to Ubuntu. An investigation turned out that I cannot fix that as a package maintainer and most likely since 2026-02-01 it is no longer possible to install any of the two outdated packages on Debian. And although I currently don't use IntelliJ (currently), I do use Debian.

This certainly did not help my motivation and moving in February also did not leave much time to think about it. Ultimately, I have to realise that maintaining the packages any further is not important enough for me. I don't have any use case, there are problems installing it on my Distro of choice, and there are good alternatives available. Additionally, there are other projects and ideas that fascinate me more and I much prefer to invest time in them.

If I would need to install IntelliJ IDEA on my systems today, I would likely use the JetBrains Toolbox App (I already use that at work for PhpStorm and it works flawlessly for me). But there is also a PPA by Jonas Gröger providing packages for not just IntelliJ but also many other JetBrains IDEs.