My suggestion would be that the rollout becomes an opportunity to remove all those orphaned snaps which haven’t been maintained in years. Once that happens it will be clear that there aren’t that many well-maintained snaps compared to Flathub for example. But rather focus on quality than quantity. Those that are maintained work very well for me so no complaints there.
Going to the snap store to install horribly outdated apps without even realising at first will not help to reinvigorate interest in the platform.
Back from leave this week so I’m excited to jump back into the conversation!
Wrt the launcher name, I believe the current approach is to name the launcher Ubuntu Software when running on plain ole Ubuntu, and then to name it Software otherwise. I think we could do a similar approach here, although I do like the App Center suggestion from @carlo.gamna above which would remove that requirement.
To @simonsaysthis, I believe there is work ongoing on how to identify ‘stale’ snaps so hopefully we can simply apply a filter in the search results to address this.
You can install the Store locally by running sudo snap refresh snap-store --channel=preview/edge/ubuntu-23.10, but I expect it should become the default on mantic shortly.
latest/stable is the wrong channel, if you want to go back to the original store channel. For Ubuntu 22.04 the correct command is:
sudo snap refresh snap-store --channel=latest/stable/ubuntu-22.04
For 23.04 it is:
sudo snap refresh snap-store --channel=latest/stable/ubuntu-23.04
I hope the new Ubuntu Store is able to view the subchannels and to preselect the correct subchannel, because many people got in the wrong channel when reinstalling a snap.
It won’t replace it, but we are rethinking the software updater experience as part of the next cycle to provide a more coherent software management experience across the distro as a whole.
Will you be able to install packages that are not “apps” with this store? To me at least, “apps” are graphical programs that show up in your launcher, and maybe some types of standalone command line programs. But not most command line tools, fonts, drivers, programming languages, frameworks or misc. dependencies. And definitely not system updates! The “App Store” name makes sense on iOS since Apple does limit what you can install to “apps”, but there is a lot more software you can install on Ubuntu!
Ubuntu Mantic 23.10 snap-store 0+git.ee184ea 1034 latest/stable/
In the 1St screen I see shotwell, if I click on it I see shotwell but I search for apps and enter ‘shotwell’ i have no result.
IMHO, Snap Store Itself is the best name, not specific to any distro but only to its utility, like for flatpaks you go to flathub, for snap you go to snap store thats it.
P.S. That name also very clearly makes the user aware about what they expect from the store just like one expects flatpaks from flathub , hence i think its the best name for the store. Simple & Meaningful, true to its nature & function.
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