There's Still Interest In A Fedora Software Center

It's a topic that has been brought up before, but there's still a number of users and developers interested in seeing a "Software Center" / "App Store" for Fedora Linux.

Every so often the idea of having a proper Fedora Software Center -- similar to that of the Ubuntu Software Center -- is brought up in various discussion channels. For the past few days has been the latest conversation about having a Fedora Software Center, this time again the discussion is being had on the Fedora Project devel list.

Started this time by Jiri Eischmann of Red Hat, he asked about any progress in having a software center for Fedora. There was a Google Summer of Code project this year to have a distribution-independent software center/store built atop PackageKit. This project involved making the Ubuntu Software Center run atop PackageKit and the AppStream framework; AppStream-Core just had its first release a few days ago. The GSoC project was part of the openSUSE involvement.

As other possibilities to the PackageKit-based Ubuntu Software Center port, there's also a PackageKit-based "Light Software Center" as well as Apper as another program using AppStream.

Red Hat's Eischmann ended his mailing list message with, "I'm asking because I hear from many (not only) beginners that they would appreciate something like Ubuntu Software Center in Fedora. I guess it's one of the main reasons why many users rather go for Ubuntu than Fedora."

Some feel that this software center could come about if Fedora's infrastructure team just enabled AppStream support with the Fedora packages, but it turns out to be a much bigger challenge than that as outlined in this follow-up message. There's legal blockers to clear, web-site work to be done, processes to be determined, and much more. There's interest by users in having a Fedora Software Center, but not many people actually stepping up to do this work.

While there's still much activity in this mailing list thread, so far it (unfortunately) doesn't look like anything new will materialize in the near future for having an officially supported Fedora Software Center.