Trisquel's "Add/Remove Applications" program, gnome-app-install, has been discontinued upstream for a while and maintained independently by Trisquel. It has several issues:
* It gets its list of installable applications from the app-install-data package, which is based on the packages which were available in Ubuntu 15.10. Unless we come up with a way to generate our own application data, it will become increasingly out-of-date with each Trisquel release. * It depends on gksu, which is deprecated, and as of Ubuntu 18.04 is no longer present upstream, so in order to work in Trisquel 9 it needs to be modified to use pkexec instead. * It depends on GTK2, which means that eventually, possibly for Trisquel 10, it will need to be ported to GTK3. Given the amount of work which will be needed in order to maintain the quality of this package, it would be preferable to find regularly-maintained replacement. The obvious candidate is gnome-software, which appears to be the successor to gnome-app-install. However, it also has issues, some minor, some major: * It is a buggy piece of crap. On every version of every distro I've tried it with, it has never worked out of the box without trying several workarounds, if at all. I just installed it on Trisquel 9, and it could not find any application data. If Ubuntu 18.04 has gnome-software configured to work out of the box, we can look into how they do it, but it would be nice to have something that worked reliably. * It recommends software from third party repositories. In Ubuntu 18.04, Snap and Flatpak integration is separated out into plugins, so this should be easier to disable than in the past. However, gnome-software also recommends software from PPAs the user has added, without making it clear that the software is from a third party repo. This means that if a user adds a PPA containing non-free software, they will see that non-free software in gnome-software, and may assume that Trisquel is recommending it and expect it to be free. We'll need to modify gnome-software, or whatever backend it uses for appstream data, to limit its recommendations to software in Trisquel's repositories. * It uses client-side decorations, which at this time Trisquel's GTK theme does not handle well. This is not a bug in gnome-software, but in Trisquel's GTK 3 theme, so this is really only a strike against gnome-software in that it will require us to deal with a known problem sooner. (Side note: if anyone is good with editing GTK 3 themes, help with this would be great.) Before I get to work on cleaning up gnome-software, can anyone recommend any alternative to gnome-app-install and gnome-software which might be better? It does not necessarily have to be packaged in Ubuntu. If another Debian-based distro has its own apt frontend which works better we may be able to import that to Trisquel.
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