Can I use zesty/artful/bionic packages in xenial ubuntu?

I have xenial Ubuntu and wanted to install espeak by this command:

sudo apt-get install espeak-ng-espeak

But I got this error message:

E: Unable to locate package espeak-ng-espeak

Then I went to and searched for it and found it inside these three distos: zesty/artful/bionic

How can I install it?

2 Answers

If you can meet the dependencies, you can install it; however, as Dobey says:new packages usually have newer dependencies. Thus, trying to install can easily become a dependency nightmare. Also, mixing version, like mixing distros, could cause hard to trace problems. It is best to see if it has been backported.

To enable backports add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb xenial-backports main restricted universe multiverse 

Generally speaking, no, you can't just take packages from a newer version of Ubuntu and install/run them on older versions. They often have newer dependencies as well, and depending on what those are, they make break other parts of the system. Therefore, the general rule is that packages need to be backported to work on older releases.