An App Store Coming To Ubuntu?
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Normally the idea of an application store or “center” would be said to be unneeded, as Ubuntu has existing repositories with software which can be installed a variety of ways, most easily from Add/Remove. But others still feel that something more mainstream friendly might be in order here.
Whatever is ends up being, I believe it will need the following to be a worthwhile upgrade to the existing front end. Screen shots, reviews and aisles for easier deployment.
Basically and sadly at the same time, it needs to be more like the OLD CNR app management tool found in Linspire 5.0 and earlier. It was simple, integrated, required nothing short of one-single-click to install software. And best of all, it allowed users to install entire aisles of software onto other systems without tons of extra work.
2 Comments
Conrad
May 26th, 2009
at 12:08pm
The default repositories in Linux overall has always been a bit too serious for me and can be really intimidating to the new user. I think a Ubuntu “shop” will be a great idea.
I’ve found http://www.appnr.com to be a great site though. It is a more userfiendly online repository. If you don’t know it, do yourself a favor and go check it out!
Great post!
Glenn Roberson
May 27th, 2009
at 1:45pm
While I personally have had no trouble with Synaptic, Add/Remove, or apt-get for that matter, I realize that I’m not an average computer user by any stretch of the imagination. I have been into electronics for around 48 years, a licensed Ham radio operator for 45 years, and have been into computers since the early ’80s (since before MS Windows existed).
While I personally don’t really need such a service, it would be nice and quite convenient. I checked out the appnr website above and found it to be quite useful. Instead of going through Synaptic and needing to highlight some app only to find a very abbreviated and inadequate description of what the app does, you can go through the list, have the abbreviated description immediately viewable, and click on it for a fairly detailed description. This makes it quite convenient over my usual method of doing a search on the software and going to the site that hosts it for a more detailed description.
Another good similar site is http://www.getdeb.net/ . Quite similar, but seemingly the possibility of getting software that isn’t necessarily included in the Ubuntu repositories.