GNOME Software 3.12.0 Released!

Today I released gnome-software 3.12.0 — with a number of new features and a huge number of bugfixes:

gnome-software-312-main

I think I’ve found something interesting to install — notice the auto-generated star rating which tells me how integrated the application is with my environment (i.e. is it available in my language) and if the application is being updated upstream. Those thumbnails look inviting:

gnome-software-312-details

We can continue browsing while the application installs — also notice the ‘tick’ — this will allow me to create and modify application folders in gnome-shell so I can put the game wherever I like:

gnome-software-312-installing

The updates tab looks a little sad; there’s no update metadata on rawhide for my F20 GNOME 3.12 COPR, but this looks a lot more impressive on F20 or the yet-to-be-released F21. At the moment we’re using the AppData metadata in place of update descriptions there. Yet another reason to ship an AppData file.

gnome-software-312-updates

We can now safely remove sources, which means removing the applications and addons that we installed from them. We don’t want applications sitting around on our computer not being updated and causing dependency problems in the future.

gnome-software-312-sources

Development in master is now open, and we’ve already merged several large patches. The move to libappstream-glib is a nice speed boost, and other more user-visible features are planned. We also need some documentation; if you’re interested please let us know!

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

38 thoughts on “GNOME Software 3.12.0 Released!”

  1. I’m using Fedora 20 and these improvements look amazing! Thanks for all your hard work, especially on the infrastructure side of things.

  2. Hi Richard, thanks for all the hard work. I’ve been using your COPR repository for a few days and it works very well! One thing about GNOME Software bugs me, though. I cannot install updates whenever I’m asked to because it requires reboot, so I postpone it till e.g. the end of the day, but the reminders keep coming. I think the frequency is too high. It should pop up once a day max.

  4. I’d almost switch to Fedora for this tasty and beautiful looking GNOME Software app. Too bad Arch doesn’t really play well when it comes to GNOME Software (I currently use Arch) :(

    1. Yes, this would be really nice to have on arch. Unfortunately nobody has updated the packagekit integration so we are stuck with version 0.7.6…

  6. Great work Richard and thank you so much for the COPR repository!

    Has the possibility of right-clicking to activate multi-selection been implemented yet (similar to how it is done in Music, Photos and Documents)? :)

    1. Definitely it would be great.

      Or at least an option to “update on next shutdown”. Having to interrupt my work for rebooting and updating is annoying.

        1. Looking forward to it. “Restart and install” really sucks if you have a crypted harddrive, having to guard the computer for the reboot and following decryption-passphrase-dialog twice. That is what has kept from actually use that feature at all.

  10. Hi Richard, can you point to the code or a wiki page that describes how the star ratings are calculated? Or are the only two criteria just language and update frequency.

  11. Category: Games
    could we get other sub-categories?
    My grandma would use “action” where I would distinguish between “first-person shooter” and “action-puzzle” (Zaz, https://packages.debian.org/jessie/zaz).
    Strategy: “turn-based” or “real-time”, etc. Maybe let the game freaks do this for ya?

    Besides the tree-like categories and sub-categories, how about a filter?
    A) For examples this site: http://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=gehps has some /*useful*/ filters to find the hardware, that I am looking for.
    B) Debtags: Debian introduced something for that, of course bound to their packages:
    https://packages.debian.org/jessie/sauerbraten
    http://debtags.debian.net/edit/sauerbraten “debtags”
    But so far I haven’t managed to use these tags to filter for all SDL-based games, or all First-person shooters.

    How about something similar for software?

    Currently running Fedora 20 with your COPR for GNOME 3.12, but of course I still miss Debian and would like to return to it one day… you cannot “own” 37.500 packages, but it’s still nice to have all of that software ready. They got wise and adopted systemd, GNOME 3.12 support will arrive some day…

  12. Package desriptions:
    nPush, “A logic game similar to Sokoban” or “rogue-like” etc.

    My great-grandmother may have heard of Sokoban and Rogue, I do know any.

    Yes, you probably get the descriptions from upstream. How about a filter?

    1. I’m hoping upstream will start shipping AppData descriptions soon. We’ve already got over 10% of applications in Fedora to ship these…

  13. Very nice, thank you. Is someone updating the Ubuntu repository? I’d really love to get my hands on this gem.

    1. I don’t know if anyone is updating the GNOME packages on Ubuntu. I’m just writing a blog post about how to use gnome-software on Ubuntu, but setting up an Ubuntu jhbuild environment is taking quite some time.

  14. AppData, hmm:

    I would like to play “Rigs of Rods”. But since neither Debian nor Fedora package it, and I am to lazy to compile it myself, I will wait until I can install Rigs of Rods the “suave” way: Linux containers for Applications. Correct, no more RPM/DEB-packages, and also less shared libries on the system. Also less dependency hell for the distros.

    It also means, I can install any version I like and also that upstream, can package any version just once for pretty much all Linux distros out there. Finally. And we have only waited 14+ years for this.

    Is the work now flowing into this AppData-thingy going to be useful for those packages?

    1. AppData is just content for the application installer to consume. I’ll be just as useful on rpms, debs or in a glick2 bundle.

    1. You just need to include AppData and get it included in the distro. We don’t support paid apps at this time for lots of legal and other reasons.

  16. Ho and by the way, I really like your work ! The store is simple and beautiful !

    There are not so much information, only the needed once.
    As already pointed out in previous comments, only screenshots are missing, otherwise it’s just perfect !

  17. Will be also avalable any plugins in future? Such as for Gentoo (emerge, layman, gentoolkit etc.).
    If it were, it would can be awesome universal tool. Searching through regular expressions like bonus.
    Thank you developers.

    1. There is a plugin architecture (most of the functionality is achieved using plugins that depend on each other) but I’m not sure how many “hacker features” we want in a tool designed to be simple to use.

  18. Install “gnome-chemistry-utils”, it is one package containing GChemPaint, GChemCalc, GChem3D, GCrystal, GSpectrum and GChemTable.

    I can see gnome-chemistry-utils nor one of the contained applications to put it into the folder Chemistry.

    1. These should really be split up so that one sub-package == one desktop file. Each desktop file needs an AppData file ideally too.

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