This is an installation guide for the Arduino IDE on Ubuntu.

Pick a version

Version: ..

Download and extract the Arduino IDE

Either download it from the Arduino website, or use Wget to download it directly.
Then extract the archive to ~/opt. 

cd /tmp
wget https://downloads.arduino.cc/arduino--linux64.tar.xz
mkdir -p ~/opt/
tar -xf arduino--linux64.tar.xz -C ~/opt/

Install the Arduino IDE

The default installation folder is ~/.local.

There seems to be a bug in the installation script that expects ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor to be present, so we'll have to create that directory first. 

mkdir -p $HOME/.local/share/icons/hicolor
cd $HOME/opt/arduino-
./install.sh

You'll get a warning Removing symlink failed. Hope that's OK. If not then rerun as root with sudo. You can safely ignore it, because we'll make the right symlink ourself: 

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s ../../opt/arduino-/arduino ~/.local/bin/
ln -s ../../opt/arduino-/arduino-builder ~/.local/bin/

If ~/.local/bin is not already in your path, add it: 

echo "export PATH=\"$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH\"" >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile

Add your user to the dialout group

Your user needs access to the serial ports of you computer in order to upload sketches to the Arduino.
You can either add your user to the group manually, using the following command: 

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Alternatively, you can run the arduino-linux-setup.sh script to do it for you. It'll also handle udev rules for some Arduinos and programmers, and fixes some modemmanager problems. 

./arduino-linux-setup.sh $USER

Start the Arduino IDE

You should now be able to start the Arduino IDE from the start menu, by double-clicking an .ino file, or from the terminal: 

arduino

Tested on