GNOME Software, GNOME's App Store, Is Drawing Some Fresh Criticism

[gufide]

well... pacman works great for me
I think it's sad to see a GNOME software behave like that. It should not block any package from other DE by default. KF5 apps integrates itself really great in GNOME and don't draw the whole plasma-desktop as dependency. I think GNOME sould not lock themselves down to their products. Anyway, GNOME always developed for GNOME and screw other. Look at KDE, they are making a powerful, generic framework for doing apps that work on windows and wayland and can be useful not only for KDE developers but for any app developers who want to use powerful libraries. That's the way to make open-source software. Help others and help them to help you. Don't develop everything for you and only for yourself. This is one reason I switched to KDE. I must admit that the KDE4 software didn't targeted much on design, and ended up with cluttered UI. However, I like the new design guidelines the design group made. I hope that for 2015 we will finally see the new music player amarok has more bugs than features by now

[Hamish Wilson]

Just another person chiming in to say that if you are interested in CLI packages you are always just going to use the CLI package manager by default anyway.

Hell, I just use plain yum or plain pacman when I can for everything to begin with...

[MoonMoon]

Then only show Gnome packages.
Put it in the FAQ, help files and other information, documentation.
Let distributions decide what they want to include in the app store, what sources they use, etc...

The right response is for the other desktop environments to also make an app store.
The people who are building the distributions should be in charge what the app stores have as content, sources and if app store accounts are introduced, where accounts are managed.

So, if you run a GNOME system but prefer K3B for CD/DVD burning you will have to either use a CLI package manager or you just install KDE to be able to use its app store to install K3B. Yeah, that really sounds intuitive and makes total sense.
And why would you need a DE centrific app store in the first place? Why not just create GUI frontends for the package manager? This way everyone can install any software in the repositories in the way they prefer.
Seriously, DE specific app stores sound a lot like "Our apps are crap, so we have to create an app store which excludes other software, so that our software is used nonetheless!"
Where are the usual "But Linux is about choice!" posters in this case?

[jpp650]

At first look this seems to be a sectarian way of do things.

Anyway I left GNOME 3 desktop some years ago because of its pre-assumption about the existence of hardware acceleration and its horrible performance on VirtualBox.
I discovered MATE and Linux Mint, although I still use Fedora with MATE Desktop.

I don?t like the way things are going with Linux and free software world: It seems to me that begin to appears hidden interests maybe coming from commercial companies.

[bluedragon777]

Let's be honest here; how many of us techs install apps, let alone just CLI tools, with a GUI? I know I don't. Just drop to a CLI and use the underlying package manager to get the goods, and let n00bs play with the software centre. Just a thought.

Synaptic->CLi->Ubuntu software center...

With Ubuntu and LXDE switching to QT and this kind of leadership from gnome,I am afraid the gnome project has a bleak future...But IMHO I always liked KDE more...

[finalzone]

Gnome Software is for Applications or frontend having desktop icons only including user's favourite terminal. CLI applications are available via terminal or switching to text mode anyway.
An example of app like Phoronix Test Suite which uses a terminal is available on Gnome Software. Even K3B is mentioned on previous is listed.
Visit https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software for more details or try Gnome Software yourself via Fedora 21

[Luke]

Personally I prefer synaptic, but new users may not

In the old days gnome-app-install or whatever it was called had an "advanced mode" button that would start an instance of synaptic. I prefer synaptic because I treat Ubuntu alphas as a single rolling release and need to be able to manage pins and partial updates with ease. It manages all packages, not just top level apps and does not discriminate against anything except applications that cannot be installed by free download from a repository. I can't install my own packages with synaptic because they are not in a repo, but I just use dpkg directly for that anyway. As for support for paid software, I have no use for that and thus remove Ubuntu Software Center as unused software.

If GNOME and KDE each end up with their own app innstallers, and ever get into the habit or ignoring the other's packages by default, that would be a serious nuisance for distros not wanting to create their own app installer, as synaptic is poorly suited to a non-hacker user trying to find top level packages without sorting through every package on the system. I also worry about synaptic ever becoming unmaintained, as the new style app installers have always been of little use for my purposes and managing all those partial updates and pins from the command line would get to be a nuisance.

[liam]

The problem comes down to Gnome devs wishing to write a desktop for the average user... instead of the user targeted by the prd. The continual watering down of that original prd target, in practice, is the source of these issues.
Fedora should, IMHO, carry patches for the software center that allow it to both install nongui items as well as other desktops.
The fact that the actual, official, response is to force the user to determine, ahead of time, where the top they wish to install will be located (CLI, gs, OR Dev assistant) and go there isn't so obviously a dreaded cognitive burden is mind blowing to me.

[blackiwid]

well... pacman works great for me
I think it's sad to see a GNOME software behave like that. It should not block any package from other DE by default.

....

However, I like the new design guidelines the design group made. I hope that for 2015 we will finally see the new music player amarok has more bugs than features by now

Sorry I dont get what the hell is this news about, if I go in software to musik -> playing(german wiedergabe) First Link I see is Amarok.

I find firefox libreoffice all is there what matters. yes you find no konquerer or kate, but why the hell would you want to use kde specific basic misc apps when you use gnome? Yes there are shurly 5 people out there that have good reasons for that, but this 5 people will shurly be able to work around this.

Even without cli and kde tools it displays 5 sites of results when I search browser.

Every distro can define this differntly so this problem does in reality not exist. Its a good default to dumb down stuff, thats the paradigm gnome choose. its the nr.1 reason ubuntu became so popular in the first place some dont like that dont use it.

I migrated from gnoem to emacs (and i3wm) but still I think gnome is a good projekt. I would like to see them giving advanced users some tools to use it more productive like a good tiling mode, but they did make much stuff right in my opinion just not far enough, but they target a wide spectrum of users so its harder to do certain stuff as if you target only some kind of people.

I would never install over gnome-software in gnome konkeror and also never install over gnome-software gcc.

[Awesomeness]

I find the Gnome Software approach fully OK. Gnome makes software for dumb people. Of course they don't show software that dumb people can't use.