It's been years and Gnome Software still doesn't work correctly

Ask Fedora
1

I don’t mean to be rude or be complaining Carl, I appreciate everything you developers and community have done for GNU Linux all these years, so I want to begin by expressing my gratitude, thank you!

And as always, anything I post is to improve GNU Linux.

My problem is, for probably over 5 years now, maybe even longer but I haven’t used Fedora that long, Gnome Software just doesn’t work even remotely correctly.
Compared to Debian, which works basically correctly, but can also be improved, it is a complete mess on Fedora.
First of all you can’t even uninstall 2 applications at once, because once you begin uninstalling 1 app the entire thing glitches, chops, hops and loads, turns completely grey, then lists either zero apps as installed or only recent apps downloaded after installation as installed, during the uninstallation process, does that make sense?
So you can only uninstall 1 at a time, and that’s not the worst part, before and after uninstallation you gotta wait for it to reload and hop 50 times first.
I mean, I guess I don’t have to explain it too well, because we all should have seen and experienced it by now, which is why I wonder why no one has really bothered fixing it.
I am sure it is a big reason why many desktop users still prefer Windows.

It is so utterly unusable on Fedora, even browsing new apps to download is completely glitched, it loads forever, then once you think it’s done oops just gotta reload 3 times first, it is akin to signing in to a Microsoft account using a web browser, a kangaroo hop experience to say the least.

Well, everything can’t be perfect, especially not on a free OS, and this is a QoL UI user experience thing, the technical system aspects are still wonderful and amazing in Fedora.

Thanks for reading, and as always have a good day!

EDIT: Not to mention how easy it would be to bot fake reviews.

EDIT 1: And the fact that I have to restart my entire PC twice in order to update Firefox, this goes for both Fedora and Debian. Very annoying especially while using disk encryption.

2

LOL, thats worst than Windoze updates.

3

Fedora provides the GNOME apps as is, complaining here will not change anything.
You may gain more attention from its developers by posting to the GNOME forum and including links to the relevant issues.

Personally, I tried using GNOME Software a decade ago and experienced similar problems, so I won’t be surprised if nothing changes in another decade.
It seems inherently broken, but there’s no better GUI alterntives either due to PackageKit’s limitations or because of the sunk cost fallacy effect.

Thankfully, there’s DNF to save us from this nonsense, just pretend GNOME Software does not exist, or remove it along with PackageKit to save traffic on metered connections.

1 Like
4

True true, if you have an account for an official Gnome forums please post for me, I dislike having to create so many new accounts all the time. Thanks!

5

I have had so many problems with using gnome software in the past, including the forced reboots, that I avoid it like the plague.

It is very easy to run sudo dnf upgrade or sudo dnf install PACKAGENAME or sudo dnf remove PACKAGE1 PACKAGE2 and have it show you exactly what it will try to do (including errors if any exist).

Doing this bypasses the fact that gnome software is intended to be one click and done but totally hides what is happening behind the screen so the user never knows what actually is being performed.

If you want to know what is being done, almost never have a problem, and see any error messages reported, then simply use dnf on the command line and avoid the GUI interface for package management.

2 Likes
6

I don’t know anyone who likes the Gnome software app. I’m on KDE now with Discover and it’s a little better. But I generally use the terminal when I can. The best functioning software center I’ve seen is Mint’s. While it’s not the prettiest, it has a great selection, it does searches with partial words (which helps when I can’t remember exactly what a program is called), and it works fast.

7

You may gain more attention from its developers by posting to the GNOME forum and including links to the relevant issues.

The “go to” way I use to find where to post targeted bugs is to find the package that owns the tool, then run ‘rpm -qi’ against it:

rpm -qf `which gnome-software`

which would find “gnome-software” so this is a simple one. Then:

rpm -qi gnome-software | grep Bug

to grep for the “Bug URL” line in the query info, so that’s the URL to post bugs:

Bug URL https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/gnome-software

8

It uses packagekit, which attempts to support multiple package management systems, including cockpit. From wikipedia:

Although PackageKit is still maintained, no major features have been developed since around 2014.

Meanwhile, Fedora has introduced dnf5 for good reasons: https://www.tecmint.com/dnf-vs-dnf5/.

1 Like
9

First off, yeah, GNOME Software does seem hopelessly broken.

My 2 cents here:

  1. I don’t think graphical app stores as a frontend for a CLI package manager make much sense (and this use case doesn’t exist at all on Fedora Silverblue)
  2. For flatpaks it’s another story, and there’s now a very good libadwaita flatpak app store called Bazaar.

I realize that flatpak has a CLI, but since it specifically targets GUI apps, the concept of a graphical app store fits much better. For these reasons, I don’t really see the point of fixing GNOME Software, when there are already better alternatives out there.