So, besides the fact that I cannot find any practical way to disable Gnome Software, now I am seeing another issue: it doesn’t allow to disable Fedora flatpak repo. This goes with another annoying feature, lets say I search for Thunderbird, Gnome Software finds only TWO packages and BOTH are flatpaks. When I search with DNF I find the regular RPM, which exists but for some reason is not shown in Gnome Software.
Some could say “well just remove Gnome Software alltogether and use DNF”, I would like to avoid it for two reasons, I would like to keep it in case I need it and I am a bit worried about removing too many things or the wrong ones.
I no longer use Workstation, but when I did, the first thing I’d do after a clean installation would be to remove all packages relating to gnome-software\*. I never encountered an issue using dnf and flatpak explicitly to stay up to date. The downsides? None that I recall.
Now that I’m using the KDE Plasma Edition, I do the same thing with all packages relating to plasma-discover\*. Still uncovering no downsides.
I am trying to not sound bitter and harsh, also considering english is not my native language, it seems decisions are made in order to enforce some ideas on the public and/or to promote some product/service to customers. This goes on across the whole “linux community” and the result is, despite in theory you can code it yourself and compile and build and so on, it is increasingly difficult to set thing the way you need or like, you are somehow pushed in the “mainstream” direction.
In our case, tricks that work today to disable Gnome Software and related services will stop working at any point in the future because changes in both the software itself and the way it is managed.
This sort of “guerrilla tactics”, upstream decide to make things this way, I try to work around those decisions, more changes are made, other tricks needed, results in frustration and at some point you just give up.
I gave up the idea of having Gnome Software available when needed but not running in background at any boot, for some reason it must be always running. Now I am going to give up the idea I am allowed to chose which repository I check with it because for some reason I must have “default” flatpak enabled. My guess is tomorrow I will give up the idea of the “immutabile system” from above and “anything user” as flatpak.
I am in bad mood because nowadays even if you don’t make any changes to the default install you get obvious errors and bugs which weren’t either detected or fixed during the testing period. Reporting bugs is a waste of time and it becomes annoying when you are told “well, you made this change to the default configuration, your fault” (please revert to default and come back).
In other words, things barely work as they are, I am old and tired and I don’t have the will and energy to fight against everying.
I’m not sure that uninstalling gnome-software* is a trick. I also don’t think that doing that will be “disabled” without a user explicitly installing those packages again.
I’m also not sure complaining about flaws you’re perceiving to exist in Gnome here in a Fedora forum is the most effective path to take.
There is no giving up as a sysadmin: Defaults aren’t optimal, and everything can be tuned better and/or faster
I last used Handbrake years ago on Windows; last night I thought “I wonder if I can download Handbrake”; I did Ctrl + Alt + T → package-manager search handbrake → and found handbrake-gtk. Took seconds, I didn’t think anything of it, and know it’s only coming from one source.
Stick with what works; GUI Synaptic failed for me on Ubuntu 7 early-2000s and I stuck with CLI since then everywhere (apt, yum/dnf, zypper, pkg all work consistently various OSs)
I remove gnome-software every distro; on Fedora this can set packagekit to be on-demand and not leave an always-running service for command-not-found:
Friend, I installed Fedora 44 and I got a Grub error even before the system could boot. I am not confident that uninstalling stuff that is basically made mandatory by the gods above would improve the whole circus. Sorry if I complain about something that everybody sees in the Water Cooler section.
Hi Lorenzo,
The laptop, despite being from 2008, still runs GNOME very well. I also run Windscribe VPN and Biwarden on this device with Argon2id 256MB and 3 iterations.
Ciao
Gnome Software is a tool for searching packages, reading information about packages, installing and removing packages.
There is also the advantage Gnome Softare handles both “native” packages and flatpaks, somehow manages repositories (well not actually, almost, you don’t want to much power to the user).
So far so good, you don’t need Gnome Software to run in background for the functions above.
Now the real deal:
Gnome Software is used for system updates and release upgrades. It seems the gods above believe if updated and upgrades aren’t enforced people would ignore them for ever. Even better, updated and upgrades are best applied automatically and in silent mode so people don’t even know about them. Unfortunately the same gods have decided that to apply updates you must restart the system twice each time and so you aren’t told what happens exactly because, you know, too much information hurts but you are shown an advancing line between the two reboots.
I met one of the Gnome Gods. His name was Larry. We had a cup of tea, and he said once users are ready and want to move past Gnome Software, they should put it aside and use the command line.
If I search for Thunderbird - GNOME Software finds two entries. One is from Flathub - the other the DNF (probably Fedora Flatpak, too - but again, that’s disabled):
Back when Gnome 2 was getting ready to be released, I found a number of things about it that I found unacceptable and what I quoted above was one of them. Instead of just complaining about it, I took action: after doing some research, I installed Xfce, removed Gnome completely and never looked back. If there are enough things about Gnome that you don’t want to live with, don’t use it. Just because it’s the default doesn’t mean that you can’t use a different DE if that’s what floats your boat. Fedora Linux is all about choice, and choosing the DE you like is just part of that.
Actually GNOME Software finds two entries (instead of one, as with most of the other apps): one of the entries presents both the RPM and the Flatpak versions as packaged by Fedora, and the other one presents two Flatpaks: one from Fedora and one from Flathub.
This is more a result of the way Fedora chose to package and ship two Thunderbird versions with different app ids (one of which is considered end-of-life), without providing any hint in the naming or description of the apps, which would differentiate the two. See here some details.
Next time you meet Larry ask him why there isn’t any button in Gnome Software so I can let it sleep in the “app grid” instead of having it loaded at any given boot. Which is annoying because it wastes CPU and RAM for no reason.
Oh, please consider that I have been using computers from back when you did not have ANY GUI at all and whatever you needed to do was “command line”. I would live happily without Gnome Software but nobody asked me, when I install Fedora it is there and basically I am not supposed to make any change, which is both difficult to understand and a bit annoying.
Yes, I can uninstall, at least so far.
But this is the same as extensions in reverse. If for extensions whatever really necessary extension should be part of the main software itself instead of something you add as an afterthough with all the consequences, here if something must be uninstalled then it should be not somehow “hardcoded” in the main software (which again points to both the lack of options and the way the thing is bolted in the deep of the system).
That was what I tought at first. Problem is Gnome Software shows on the right the kind of package it founds and both instances it said “flatpak” and none said “RPM”. I did not try installing to see if it was just a visual glitch, at that point I just moved to DNF because I needed the RPM. But again in this rant I am saying Gnome Software is basically useless and yet cumbersome and annoying and difficult to get rid of besides uninstalling.
For one of the two entries it shows both the RPM and the Flatpak from Fedora, for the other it shows two Flatpak options (one from Fedora and the other one from Flathub). If this is different in your case, then it might have to do with some changes in the default settings.
But as you mentioned, this is your place to vent, so please disregard my observations if not useful.
However you are right .. the rpm is still not visible in the Gnome software (F44).
Have a look here are a lot of tickets about thunderbird: 2429314 – thunderbird-150.0.1 is available
I do assume, that they not show it in gnome software to not frustrate users which search for a working version. This way they have to use flatpak version to being able to get this working without issues?
