A major revamp in functionality is coming to the app

Jan 17, 2019 05:11 GMT  ·  By

GNOME Software, the app used for installing, updating, and removing software from your GNOME-based GNU/Linux operating system, will get a major revamp in functionality for the upcoming GNOME 3.32 desktop environment.

A new development snapshot of GNOME Software 3.32 landed this week with lots of improvements for the Flatpak universal package format, allowing new permissions for Flatpak updates and displaying permissions for installed Flatpak apps. GNOME Software also now shows correct version numbers for installed Flatpaks.

The update mechanism for Flatpak apps was switched to use a single transaction, allowing the GNOME developers to share more code with the flatpak command-line utility, and it looks like GNOME Software 3.32 will offer better support for installing Flatpak repository files, also known as flatpakref, and for Flatpak plugins.

GNOME Software to start up faster and use less memory

Besides the Flatpak improvements, the upcoming GNOME Software 3.32 release brings important performance optimizations that not only will make the app start up faster, but also use less memory. The app's icon has been updated as well in this release, along with the categories for the ESRA rating system.

Among other changes coming to this major GNOME Software release that will be distributed as part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.32 desktop environment, due for release on March 13, 2019, we can mention the ability to open CAB files that include more than one update, better support for Fedora Linux upgrades, and the ability to notify users about offline updates after they've been downloaded.

Of course, there are numerous fixes present for many of the annoyances reported by users from previous releases, including but not limited to the algorithm used to count updates in the Updates page and notification, a memory corruption issue that made GNOME Software crash a lot on 32-bit systems, more detailed error messages, as well as other UI tweaks for a much smoother experience.