Ask HN: Why is the Ubuntu Software Center so buggy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is the Ubuntu Software Center so buggy?

17 pointslegrande14 comments

From my experience with the Software Center on Ubuntu, I have encountered many issues which I will outline here. Why is the Snap software center so buggy? I'm on version 18 of Ubuntu because version 20 of Ubuntu is incompatible with my laptop and crashes randomly, but the version 18 store should be smooth and non-buggy despite its legacy status. What's going on?

- Most software is stuck on an older version and lags behind the latest release.

- Sometimes software hangs when installing. Gets stuck on 95% and stays that way, with no way to get it fully installed.

- Some of the comments on software are un-moderated and you read people trying to push a political agenda saying things like 'This software is Marxist because it's free'

- The Software Center is buggy as hell and constant error messages popup when trying to install software. (Yes I've done the update/upgrade ritual before installing anything).

- Most software is lacking screenshots. I like to see what the UI looks like before I install.

- I often encounter the software I want flashing for three seconds on the screen, and then disappearing for no reason. The search functionality is broken.

- I sometimes see duplicate software packages, with one less popular version that has 1 star, and another with 4/5 stars (guess which one I download and install?)

> Most software is stuck on an older version and lags behind the latest release.

I assume you are using Ubuntu LTS, because most people do (and Ubuntu 18 would be unsupported otherwise).

This is kind of what LTS distros are for? If you want the most up to date software, use a distro like Fedora, Arch, Opensuse Tumbleweed, or Debian testing. If you use an LTS distro you're generally just going to get patches not actual new version upgrades.

(Unless you're referring specifically to snaps)

I've been a Fedora user for the last 5 years though, so I can't speak to the other issues.

The Debian/Ubuntu policy of not keeping their end user apps in repositories up to date is very strange. Generally when apps are not kept up to date on other operating systems it is usually due to limitations of hardware, performance issues, or software API support. Given that Libc doesn't exactly change between versions, why are apps not kept up to date aside from those that rely on specific kernel syscalls?

Why is it strange? They are intended to be stable distros - "stable" in the sense that they don't change / break randomly. The default is therefore to not change things, rather than to come up with reasons to avoid doing so.

This makes sense for the core operating system applications. It doesn't make sense for end user applications. If I install a web browser or a game I expect it to be kept evergreen. The way Debian handle their updates is barely marginally better than sending Windows installation wizards around. What's the point of an automatic update system if they insist on limiting themselves to the occasional security patch and not release feature updates if you don't upgrade your entire OS? The update policy needs a revamp.

Yeah I don't think you are the intended audience for LTS.

The point is to avoid breaking things. New versions remove or change APIs which breaks things.

Even when interface is preserved, implementation changes can break things. The new software may have a side effect that changes state somewhere and break things.

Even something you think is an an independent island can break things. Because you might be using that island and it is therefore no longer an island but a dependency. Software can invoke a browser and expect it to be able to receive certain messages.

Maybe it really is an island. A video game that mutates nothing, is used by no other software and is purely for human use. Maybe you are enjoying an RPG, but the devs decide to "balance" the power of some characters and it ruins the play style you were enjoying.

There's trade offs to all things of course. But you can't have your cake and eat it to.

Adding your own PPA’s to get even recent versions of things is not a great UX imho.

For example for up-to-date VIM you need to add ppa: https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/vim

I use the command-line as do the other engineers I know. That's a admittedly small sample size but maybe the GUI version isn't heavily used and is therefore not important to the business.

This is my guess, too: sudo dnf update is how I roll (Fedora). I assume most of the Gnome devs do the same, so most don’t see the issues.

Yea fuck that, I use snap instead. It is hella weird using the built in installer for .deb files. The stuck installations are way too frequent. I'm on Ubuntu 21.xx.

I agree. It is one of the first UI’s used by people new to Ubuntu and it is pretty bad. I gave up on it and use command line tools instead.

If I speak about Ubuntu it might start a riot. However I agree with the screenshots point.

I assume they are short of money to make it work.

If it was because the developers are incompetent, they would’ve been fired. But when there’s no money, there’s no money.

Why are you asking here? Why do you think HN is a support forum for Ubuntu? I think you must have gotten lost on your way to the ubuntu forums.

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