Shutter Removed From Ubuntu 18.10 And Debian Unstable, New PPA Available

Shutter screenshot tool

Shutter screenshot tool was removed from Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 18.10 (to be released tomorrow) recently.

The popular screenshot tool, which uses Gtk2 and Perl, was one of the very few packages that blocked Debian (and Ubuntu) from removing the obsolete libgnome2-perl and libgnome2-vfs-perl from the repository archive. Since Shutter doesn't work without these packages, it was removed from the Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 18.10 repositories.

This comes after some of its optional dependencies were removed from Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian Buster 6 months ago, which caused the application editing / annotation features to stop working unless the users manually installed these packages from an older Ubuntu or Debian version.

While Shutter is still under development, getting a new developer back in 2017, it doesn't seem there's been any progress to porting it to use non-deprecated Perl modules and/or Gtk3. Until this happens, Shutter won't make it back into Debian and Ubuntu. If you can help with this, check out the project page on Launchpad.

Another way you could help is by creating Snap and/or Flatpak packages for Shutter. Since such packages include the libraries required to run an application, this would be ideal for Shutter, which uses old libraries. There are currently no Snap or Flatpak packages for Shutter.

There are some alternatives out there to Shutter, like Ksnip and Flamshot which you may want to check out.

How to continue using Shutter in Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Debian


So what can you do if you still want to use Shutter? Since I use Shutter daily, I created a PPA for it and its dependencies, so others who prefer it to other screenshot tools can continue to use it. I would have built a Snap or Flatpak but I don't have the time right now to look into how to create such packages.

The PPA includes the latest version of Shutter (newer than the one available in Ubuntu 18.04), its required dependencies for Ubuntu 19.04 and 18.10, and its optional dependencies.

You can use this PPA not only in Ubuntu 19.04 and 18.10, but also in Ubuntu 18.04 / Linux Mint 19 or 19.x, not only because there's a newer Shutter version in the PPA with some bug fixes, but because it provides the missing optional Shutter dependencies. These dependencies add support for editing / annotating images in Shutter, as well a AppIndicator support, which allows the Shutter tray icon to be visible in Ubuntu 18.04 without having to enable the tray, thanks to the built-in AppIndicator support.

You can add the PPA and install Shutter in Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10 o 19.04 / Linux Mint 19 / 19.x by using these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/shutter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install shutter

Update: I also added the gnome-web-photo package to the PPA. This package allows Shutter to take full website screenshots, and it's missing from Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.10 / Linux Mint 19 You can install it after adding the PPA using (not available for Ubuntu 19.04 due to a missing dependency that doesn't build) :

sudo apt install gnome-web-photo

After it's installed restart Shutter and click on the website screenshot button (or select Web from the indicator / tray icon), then enter the URL of the website and Shutter will take a screenshot in a couple of seconds.

In Debian Unstable you'll need to download Shutter from an older version, along with its optional libgoo-canvas-perl and libgoocanvas3 (and libgoocanvas-common) dependencies.