Your experience with GNOME Software in Silverblue

My experience has been really good, it prompted me to update Dell BIOS drivers and the drivers for my thunderbolt dock. Only issue is panels not refreshing after something happens, and a lot of weird warnings about the daemon missing or English/language packs being unavailable. I’m really enjoying Silverblue so far though.

Hello @wileysneak , and welcome to the discussion area. This forum is geared towards the developers using Fedora as their daily driver. If you are looking for user support, discussion.fedoraproject.org is the place to go for that.
It looks like you have some metadata cleanup to do, possibly try rpm-ostree cleanup -m in a terminal to clear out and refresh the rpm-ostree metadata. Also it wouldn’t hurt to run sudo flatpak repair in the terminal afterwards just to make sure the flatpak install is solid. See if that will clear up that message in Gnome Software.

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Hi @jakfrost, I wasn’t actually looking for user support, but rather sharing my experience and trying to be involved in the community, sorry if this is the wrong place for that kind of feedback.

As per your suggestion I ran the metadata cleanup commands and the messages in Gnome Software have disappeared, thank you for your help.

I would say from the title that this is the right place. Sorry if I confused you, but that was your first post, I am a moderator here so I am encouraged to welcome everyone and was trying to do that, albeit a bit dryly. Anyhow, part of my standard greeting is to point out ask.fp.o as an alternative for support type discussions. I didn’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t post here, again, sorry for the confusion.

No worries, glad I posted in the right place. Didn’t want to step on any toes :slight_smile: It’s slightly off-topic, but If there’s a way I could get more involved in Silverblue’s development I’d love to help, I’m not super familiar with the internals but would love to have a go at either learning them or helping with surface-level stuff instead.

Hi @wileysneak ,
You can check here for how to help with Silverblue https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/contributing/

The Silverblue documents and several threads strongly suggest to avoid overlaying packages that already exist as flatpaks, but I’ve noticed on a fresh 34 install, GNOME Software (GS) will happily install apps that are overlays. There’s no password prompt so it’s easy end up installing dozens of overlays and being none-the-wiser.

The UI also has a bit of inconsistency. There’s a dropdown button that lets the user choose between an rpm or flatpak, but only if the app is packaged as both an overlay and a flatpak. Otherwise the user has to (somehow) know that if they scroll down and decode the Sandboxed badge and/or the URL of the source - flathub.org vs registry.fedora.org vs fedora-updates - then they can see if a package is an overlay or flatpak.

When the drop down is visible it doesn’t seem to favor flatpaks over rpm overlays. The user selects an app and clicks on Install - is it an overlay or a flatpak? I’m quite OCD about my setup so I go into the GS repository settings and disabled all the non-flatpak repos - because I know want the workflow. But I can image a non-technical user clicking buttons to install apps and ending up with an inconsistent mess of rpm overlays and flatpaks.

Oof, this all seems terribly non-obvious.

It also seems to suffer from some threading issues and constantly locks ups the UI while browsing.

So, GS is clucky enough that I have most of the repos and automatic updates disabled, and I don’t use it to search for apps. At this point in time I’d rather flatpak update -y && flatpak remove --unused && rpm-ostree update -r. I install most of my apps from Flathub using Firefox so the only use I currently get from GS is the convenience of it’s graphical default handler ability, but I could just as easily copy the install command on the app’s page and do it from the command line.

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My experience with GNOME Software is really frustrating because nothing really works. For me it crashes while searching for updates (flatpak or rpm-ostree), while starting it, while indexing the software packages, while trying to install flatpaks and at every other operation in an alternating manner. It sends notifications about auto updated flatpaks but did not update anything. In the end i’m always updating my system with rpm-ostree and flatpak directly to ensure security updates were applied. This all would be even okay if it does not allocate the same amount of memory as a Firefox with many many tabs for nothing.

This was the latest problem: first it sent the notification how it auto-updated the Signal flatpak. After opening Software it’s still there. It can’t update it because of error in the screenshot. A triggering of the update button did not change anything and when i tried flatpak directly it found the updates and worked as always.

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Hello, it may sound like I am ranting about it, but i believe it could be considered as feedback. By no means I mean any offense.

It gave me useless error messages, like saying “Language not supported” (but it is supported and used), “Application not found” (but listed in installed apps) (Error messages may not be exactly what it says, as I am translating them to English). Also what’s wrong with its search functionality? Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t even search at all. I wanted to check tlp, neofetch and steam in Software Center so i searched for them. No results came up. Press X to doubt. As I was able to install them with dnf/rpm-ostree install command. It can show Flathub results, that’s good. But maybe, at least on Silverblue, it should be set to show Flatpak results first, RPM results after.

Not to mention general Gnome unfuctionality is also in Software Center. It’s too basic for anything considerable advanced. There should be an option saying “experienced mode” or something that enables Synaptic-like experience. At least functions such as mark-to-install, mark-to-update, mark-to-remove, mark-to-ignore could be there.

I doubt Gnome will ever do that tbh. I sometimes wonder if they use their own software to accomplish any basic daily tasks on Linux :confused:

I also have this problem.

Thank you, everyone, for the feedback. We’re working hard on the issues, so that the experience in Fedora 35 is much better. We have created a Copr repository with the latest GNOME Software if you wanna try it the latest fixes and help us test it. I know installing packages from a Copr repo is a bit tricky in Silverblue, but the more testers it has the better the next release will be.

biggest problems i’m facing in gnome software is in the part of activating repositories and coprs (but that’s only in silverblue)

It would also be nice to have a button in the Gnome software to run if the rpm-ostree reset command by placing a simple button

but in this case, it would be better to adapt copr to silverblue

For Copr, we can download the repo file and put it under /etc/yum.repos.d . In this way with Silverblue it will be effective even without reboot.

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I know this is an old thread and I wouldn’t like to resurrect it for nothing, but after 1 year I wonder… has there been any progress?

I’m using Fedora 36 now and I’m still experiencing the same problems that I had 1 year ago and that other people have explained. In my case, namely these problems:

This is how it looks for awhile now. Completely stuck:

I tried with killall gnome-software and reopening. Still the same. Completely unusable. :man_shrugging:

FWIW it’s gnome-software-42.4-2.fc36.x86_64.

Edit: I just forgot about 2088878 – Silverblue: Failed to create file ?/var/run/dnf-metadata.lock.9ONHM1?: Permission denied which is the problem I was experiencing actually.