GNOME Software
Originally created by @alant on #15262 (Redmine)
Why
Usability testing showed that non-technical users are often confused by the cluttered interface of Synaptic, while technical users mostly use the command line. GNOME Software is much simpler than Synaptic, and focuses on apps, which is what non-technical users care about. It also supports Flatpak, which might help for some subset of #14567.
Subtasks
-
Persistence-setup: stop depending on synaptic (#15263 - closed) -
Adding ASP fails when a package is installed fr... (#15384 - closed) -
Hide the launcher for software-properties-gtk (#15540 - closed): not needed in the end -
Force refreshing the APT lists before Software starts - Currently, it only displays "No Application Data Found", which is not terribly helpful.
-
apt update
is not enough: thegnome-software
backend was started at login time, and it does not pick up immediately changes done byapt update
.gnome-software --quit
fixes it. To make this fix permanent, we should disable/etc/xdg/autostart/org.gnome.Software.desktop
. Or instead usepkcon refresh
? - Possibly related:
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/merge_requests/548
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/182
- https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Software/Updates#Tentative_Design
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/748
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/merge_requests/549
-
Ensure it does not enable automatic package upgrades -
Fix screenshots display - Likely we need to configure GNOME Software to use Tor
- Apparently the connection that's broken is to
appstream.debian.org
Drawbacks
- It makes
apt update
slower: it now needs to download DEP-11 metadata
Original report
User paper prototyping showed that non-technical users are often confused by the cluttered interface of synaptic, while technical users mostly use the command line. As a consequence, we thing that we should use GNOME Packagekit (Debian package: gnome-packagekit [https://packages.debian.org/stable/gnome-packagekit]) instead of synaptic as the primary way to add Additional Software to Tails.
GNOME Packagekit seems not actively developed anymore as most efforts goes in GNOME Software. GNOME Software however doesn’t fulfill the objective, as " It’s designed to be an application management application. GNOME PackageKit lives on for people that know what a package is and want a pointy-clicky GUI, so I’m not interested in showing low level details for power users." ([https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2013/03/05/gnome-software-overall-plan/]). In Debian, Software doesn’t show all software that my be of user interest (e.g. hyphenation data for you language, most fonts) and is not yet polished (shows “Sorry, something went wrong”)
GNOME Packagekit is still maintained, receiving bugfixes and translation updates, and having releases ([https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-packagekit/log/]). We may ask for confirmation that it will keep on being maintained for some time.