Thank you, of course that would be great. But it requires a Gitlab account. What exactly is Gitlab? I’ve heard of it before, but I think it’s a platform like Github.
Both are git-based collaborative version control platforms. If you know GitHub, you’ll get familiar with GitLab too.
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What specifically do you have in mind?
Note that if system updates appears in the update list, i think you can click on it to see the individual packages being updated.
I have to agree with the OP that Gnome Software, mostly since it is such an essential part of the Gnome desktop, is an underwhelming experience. My main issues personally are with the interface:
- The search option should be central to the interface and always visible to receive input. It’s suboptimal to hide it behind a small magnifying glass in the top corner.
- Search results are really poor in terms of information and lack crucial details. For example searching for a term like
flacwill produce a result like this:
Important information missing:
- Number of results / pagination indication
- Software category information and filter
- Version information
- Package type information (RPM/Flatpak etc)
- Number of votes for rating
Other suboptimal aspects of the app:
- Installed and Updates shouldn’t have to be separate tabs
- Explore is a poorly chosen name for what is basically “Home” or “Start”
- It requires a number of steps to see which sources are available (e.g. RPM vs Flathub) and what the differences are in terms of version number, installation size etc.
- The app always requires the user to reboot for RPM updates, even for packages that don’t need it at all
- Package update information is mostly hidden behind a generic “System updates” label:
- No progress indicators (anymore?)
- No configurable (auto) update schedule
I could go on…
The Fedora forums are obviously not the right place to complain about this, but it’s a notably underwhelming piece of software since it’s so crucial to the OS.
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Well it’s always one click away, hardly seems hidden.
The GNOME HIG says “The standard pattern for search in GNOME utilizes a search bar which slides down from beneath the header bar. In primary windows, the search bar is typically hidden until it is activated by the user.”
To be fair, it also says “However, if search is particularly important to your app, the search entry can be located elsewhere and made to be permanently visible.”
I think the present way is fine and in line with other GNOME apps, but I see your point.
In the search results? I can’t think of any app stores that do this.
I don’t know if they want to add this feature or not, but given that this is GNOME we’re talking about, I doubt they will. Users are not supposed to have to worry about the type of package (even if in practice it can be useful to know in some cases).
But then there might be too much stuff going on in the combined tab. It’s not like there’s a shortage of space at the top anyway.
What does Home or Start even mean? Explore gives an idea about what the tab is actually meant for. The app usually opens in the Explore tab anyway, no need to tell you it’s the starting tab, and I don’t really see why it deserves to be Home any more than the Updates tab, which is probably the most used anyway.
I strongly agree, especially with disk encryption offline upgrades are annoying as heck. Leave it as the default to reduce issues, sure, but there really should be an option.
Otherwise there would be a massive list of packages with weird names that most people probably don’t care about in the slightest. And I think you can click on it to see which packages are getting updated.
I think there were last time I checked, at the bottom of the Download button or something.
I would be very much in favour of this, but again this is GNOME so probably not happening.
This is i think the case here, 9 out of 10 times when people open Software it is probably to search for an application. The tiny magnifying glass which is placed strangely* on the edge of the panel doesn’t facilitate this well.
* with strangely i mean that it is unintuitive. The viewer instinctively starts in the middle of the screen, would then have to move their eyes to the topleft edge of the screen to find the magnifying glass and move their mouse there, click, then move their mouse back to the middle of the screen where the input box appears. It requires too much unnecessary looking around and moving the mouse back and forth for such a crucial action. The magnifying glass is also small to click on and requires precision movements, which is unpractical.
It’s important because the version numbers often differ from each other, and the installation sizes can vary wildly too. Sometimes it’s 50MB for one version and 500MB for the other, due to dependencies. This matters to users.
People rarely scroll through to the Installed list, unless they want to remove something. Yet it is the second most prominent tab after Explore. It’s also composed of a long scrolling list of one single column, making poorly use of the available screen estate. It’s just suboptimal, it could easily be improved / combined with Updates with some effort, and provide a single informative overview of the state of the system.
Home and Start are the default labels used in every categorized system on the planet, from websites to application menus. It would make more sense to normal users to use one of those terms instead of Explore, which to me gives the suggestion of a guided Tour / help of some sort.
For those people, going to the Updates tab then isn’t useful anyway, since “System Updates” isn’t informative either. For that group of people it would be better to place a button Update on the start page to instantly start the update process.
Afaik this has been gone since F41, at least on my system.
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So are you thinking something like GNOME Maps, with the search bar in the middle?
I mean… everything in GNOME is rather gigantic compared to most desktops. But yeah, I suppose search is kind of the flagship feature of an app store, so maybe the corner isn’t ideal.
Yes but you can see this sort of thing once you click on the app. And the installation sizes given are often BS anyway.
Well, assuming the search bar doesn’t end up in the middle, we might as well use the space, you know? Make it easier to quickly see which apps are taking up all your disk space.
I guess that’s just the libadwaita way, but yeah using a few more columns might not hurt.
I have some doubts.
Not always - the top left corner in GNOME was Activities and now just dots; in KDE land, while Discover does use Home, System Settings and System Monitor use Quick Settings and Overview respectively; macOS has a launchpad, dashboard, dock, and apple menu, I can’t think of anything Apple calls Home; I don’t see many browsers with home buttons these days, it just appears on a new tab.
Even then, Home and Start are usually only for actual homepages - something that shows a dashboard of sorts, a mixture of things - like a news website showing news, sports and entertainment on one page, or the Windows start menu showing apps, recent files, ads, or whatever.
The Explore tab isn’t that, it’s just one of 3 tabs that each does one thing: display apps you don’t have (for the most part), display apps you have, display apps you have but need to update. From the HIG:
“The simplest navigation design pattern is the view switcher, which allows having a small number of equivalent pages within a single window. This can often be sufficient for apps which have different types of information or controls to display.
View switchers have a flat navigation structure - each page is equivalent in importance, and can be opened from any of the others.”
It gets the point across: your OS needs updating. Which is probably more informative to most users than saying cldr-emoji-annotation-dtd, perl-DateTime-TimeZone-Tzfile and xorg-x11-drv-evdev-devel need updating.
Showing which (normal, graphical) apps are getting updated is helpful imo.
Oh no
Yes i think it could just always be visible, in the same way it is shown currently after clicking the 
In principle i would agree, however flatpaks are updated automatically in the background so they are often not shown in that list. So it’s not a complete overview unfortunately.
I haven’t tried KDE in years, i might have to install that for a bit and see how it is doing these days. 
- This was my first impression too. Till I saw the spyglass and then I just had to remember it the next time I used the Software Application.
I would prefer the search field always visible with the option to auto hide to click on, for Gnome perfectionists. - It definitely would not hurt to put the spyglass on the side of Explore and also write Search beside of it.
But I also agree, it looks balanced as it is. Just for users with motor problems, catching the small spyglass while adding the word “Search” beside, would help make it bigger.
About the more detailed Information, I could imagine that with the dnf5 api and the pkcon/flatpack commands it would be probably possible to make a more detailed search option and display the information in a terminal like extra window, This way devs and users with advanced knowledge could make more precise searches and find out what could be useful to.
p.s.
Can we cal @workstation-wg or move it to discussion, to hear the toughs of the Fedora Developers? I am not sure if the majority of theme is reading here ?! Especially thinking of the dnf5 integration with the software store. Might be that we can tweak with dnf/api a bit more speed?
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I didn’t read the other posts yet, but I found it easy to remove gnome-software on F41 Workstation (I only use dnf and fwupdmgr update).
I’m pretty good at figuring out new software online, and used GNOME Software to update stuff once somewhere F30 but didn’t find it better than the above commands.
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Huh? Well maybe if you set it to do so.
I highly doubt GNOME will use dnf since thats Fedora-specific. But pkcon is probably able to do what you’re thinking anyway.
It’s enabled by default
Yes, PackageKit is the driver behind the software app while able to communicate with the dnf api.
Let me see … lately i posted some content about that:
Oh maybe I was confusing it with the KDE spin where auto updates are definitely off by default.
But wait, did you say only flatpaks updated without input? I didn’t even know that was a thing.
Yes only flatpaks, maybe because they are self contained and don’t require reboots, new versions simply replace the older ones.
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Yeah, there are a number of things which really, really could use work in GNOME Software, and you’re not the only one to notice.
However, it’s really hard to get long-term, dedicated and funded work on this, and it’s also hard to get upstream really excited about it. Upstream GNOME is focused on Flatpak, as is Endless (one of the other companies that reliably contributes to the project). Canonical is off doing their own thing — they have their own Snap-focused software store, and that’s written in Flutter, which is a cool framework, but doesn’t really fit with GNOME. And Red Hat’s customers generally have centrally managed updates and specific use-cases (like animation workstations). The management for Red Hat’s desktop team cares about Fedora, and about general-purpose desktops (read Christian Schaller’s blog if you’re not convinced) — but it’s still very hard to get something like this prioritized over all the other work that needs to be done.
So: this is very much a volunteer effort, and one that no one seems to be particularly excited about volunteering for. If I had a magic wand to wave that could make things better, I would.
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Hi Matthew, I’m so glad you shared your valuable thoughts and joined our discussion. Thank you also for your great summary. It’s really nice to be here, to share ideas, help, and collaborate. Joining Fedora is truly a pleasure.
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