Canonical hasn't made any decision regarding USC

Aug 3, 2015 08:47 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu Software Center managed to be the center of news stories after the Ubuntu MATE project decided to ditch it as default (still available in the repos), and discussions about a possible replacement in the regular Ubuntu desktop have started once more.

Ubuntu Software Center is there, and it does its job, barely. It hasn't been improved in the past couple of years, and with the exception of a couple of security issues that have been fixed, the application has remained pretty much the same. It's not clear why Canonical has put this project on standby, but it's starting to look and feel out of place. Everything is evolving around it, but USC remains the same.

Canonical has a few options at its disposal. One would be to replace it with something else, another solution is to continue to ignore it and to hope that the new store from Ubuntu Touch will take over eventually, or they could start improving it once more, preferably by starting to port it to Python 3.x.

Ubuntu devs are willing to work on GNOME Software adoption

There is a lively debate on the official mailing list about Ubuntu Software Center being ported to Python 3 after a user suggested that it might be a good idea. Many devs have pitched in, and one of them, Iain Lane, even suggested that he might be willing to work on adopting GNOME Software for Ubuntu if there was enough support for it.

"It is fair to say that the software center hasn't seen much feature development in recent times. I agree that it would be interesting for us to look into adopting GNOME Software in future. I've not looked at it much myself, but it seems as if it would provide a nice user experience. Just my views. I don't know what the rest of the desktop team thinks, but I'd be keen to at least investigate the possibility of doing this, unless we decide to dust USC off," wrote Iain Lane, Ubuntu and Debian developer.

To make things clear, this is his opinion and not the official stance of Canonical on this matter. The truth is that no one really knows what will happen with Ubuntu Software Center or what Canonical's plans are, but the fact that Ubuntu devs are willing to make some important changes is really good news.