I am running Mint Mate 19.3 and need to install a newer version of Google Earth (currently 7.3.2.5495 (64-bit).
Intending to avoid any baggage that could pollute the installation of googleearth-pro_stable_current_amd64.deb, I searched for Google Earth in the Synaptic Package Manager. These are the results:

bleachbit
googleearth-pro-stable
googleearth-package
gpsprune
gr-air-modes
libgeo-googleearth-pluggable-p
libgrits-dev
libgrits-doc
libgrits5

Grits is a "Virtual Globe" library which uses OpenGL to render an image of
the earth using satellite and terrain data from publicly accessible servers.
This is similar in concept to Google Earth and NASA World Wind, except
implemented as a library.

This package contains the HTML documentation for grits.
>
Could/should these files be removed prior to installing the latest version?

I thank you in advance for any help with this, -ll

The GE I have is self contained. I have it in /opt, it makes it's directory and installs everything in there, like firefox, and some others.

If you listed packages, you probably don't have the others installed. Get more info. You can use apt for that (I'm in Slackware now).

Went ahead and installed the new version through Software Manager. So far all is well. -l l

I had to downgrade curl to get it to stop segfaulting. There's a fairly thorough verification process behind Debian & Ubuntu, and even testing isn't the latest version.

I'd like to know more about the libgrits stuff, and NASA World Wind which don't want to track everyu move or count the hairs on your derrière like Google does