Ubuntu – Is it safe to use gdebi instead of Ubuntu Software Center to install .deb files

In the Debian Policy Manual, Chapter 7 - Declaring relationships between packages you can read

In the Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Pre-Depends, Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep control fields of the package, which declare dependencies on other packages, the package names listed may also include lists of alternative package names, separated by vertical bar (pipe) symbols |. In such a case, if any one of the alternative packages is installed, that part of the dependency is considered to be satisfied.

I cannot find any other useful information about list of alternatives in the whole document, so I should conclude that, in case none of the packages in the list is already installed, the first one in the list would be chosen. But be aware that this is only my interpretation.

This is a comon problem with the software center. It seems not to like .deb packages it does not already have packages for and they chose to not install gdebi by default. You can get around this by installing gdebi yourself and using it, instead of software center, to install .deb packages.

For similar reasons you might choose to also install synaptic which is another package the chose to drop. Sorry Canonical, many of us are simply not Windows or Macintosh users and we don't like being treated like cattle.