Feature Request: app-info or removal in show apps overview?

Applications
,
1

With the freedom of FOSS I’m unsure how feasible this is since it surely needs more metadata in the .desktop files but is it in any way possible to expand the current right-click context menu we have in Gnome in the Show Apps overview to include Application Info or even Uninstall Application options?

It seems so logical to me to have more than 2 items when I right-click an item:

image
image1828×753 147 KB

Where the first context option even is about the same as left-clicking it I guess?

One of the many things I often find myself looking for is how the heck an application was installed(pacman/yay/flatpak/snap/etc.).

A while ago the command “telegram” in my path switched to a capitalized “Telegram” which broke my custom hotkey for it. Clicking the Telegram icon in the app overview still launched it just fine but using telegram in the terminal didn’t so I was confused why the hotkey I had set used ‘telegram’ whilst it clearly didn’t exist as a command (anymore).

It took me a while to find out that this command came from the telegram-desktop Pacman package and not through Flatpak, yay or other methods. Normally I’d open up a terminal and use which telegram or which telegram-desktop to find out a bit more about where a binary is located but that didn’t work this time because the command became Telegram and I couldn’t get it auto-completed with a lowercase t.

I would love to see something, even if it works for just 30% of my applications, like this (not my best GIMP skills):

app-info-context
app-info-context1828×753 147 KB

That could give you a popup of details which package manager (if known/supported) installed the application, the package version & name (since it often deviates from the binary name) and where the binary is located (with a button to open the file explorer to it with xdg-open?)

A next level option would be to “Uninstall” the actual application from the overview instead of having to pacman -Rs, yay -R, flatpak uninstall or snap remove through the terminal.

But this last one is probably more of a pipedream since a lot of good GUI software managers can’t properly handle this too.

The first one would be a really loved feature for me and I can imagine for a lot of others too. To me it would feel like a more natural flow to get information from my Desktop about the application that I’m launching in a GUI app overview no matter how it got installed.

Would love to hear your thoughts and how unrealistic this app-info dream might be!

2

On Fedora and GNOME OS, the menu you get when right-clicking an application icon does show an item called “Application Details”, which then opens GNOME Software.

So, at least this part exists already. Maybe your missing some package, or your distribution has configured it out?

2 Likes
3

Its stuck on GNOME Software, someone needs to implement an API for GNOME Shell to use.

4

Ah! That could be why I had this functionality in mind since I started out with Ubuntu back in 2018 but have since switched to EndeavourOS for the past few years.

I thought this was about as vanilla as a GNOME desktop install could be but of course since it’s Arch based it leaves out applications like GNOME Software.
Would it be enough to install that to have it show up in my context menu or are there other configurations that need to be done to make that work?

@tragivictoria ah! great to know that there’s an issue of it, thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

I’m not entirely sure (when i still used Arch and EOS i was stuck in command line), but first I would check if just installing Software would fix it.

1 Like
6

Yes.

Now, a different question is whether it will work as expected. Assuming that Software isn’t installed by default because of missing pacman integration, it’ll likely fail to show details for any host app (flatpak should work fine).

2 Likes
7

Maybe installing packagekit would help with showing package info? i think it have pacman support

8

Well I’ve got answers to your question:

Audacity worked, as in: it instantly opened GNOME Software and took me to the Audacity page though it didn’t understand that it was installed already through Pacman of course.

I tried it on Electron32 and it gave me a nice error message toast that it can’t find that in the store.

Now the store seems to be very busy installing a bunch of app updates so trying to Search for Audacity doesn’t work currently since it’s busy doing stuff. Weird that the “search software store” process isn’t separate from the update one, but that might be me.

And it just finished doing updates after a few minutes so now I can go to the Audacity page again and install it straight from flathub.

@tragivictoria I shut down GNOME Software and installed packagekit, did a right-click on Audacity in my apps overview and went to app details but it didn’t recognize it as a pacman package in the GNOME Software app.

But good to test it out I guess!

Thanks for the suggestions both :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

its because package managers work like this. In order to do updates/search for packages its using packagekitd, a dbus service thats frontend for various package managers. And most of them dont support multiple instances running simultaneously

tho its also possible i just lied to you and that i actually dont know what im talking about (this is most possible option)

10

PackageKit integration was disabled from GNOME Software 44.1 on Arch Linux, for reason PackageKit is unreliable for handling updates: Please remove packagekit from GNOME profile · Issue #1321 · archlinux/archinstall · GitHub

Software can see which apps you’ve installed through pacman, they are listed on the Installed tab, but you can’t uninstall them from there. On Arch Linux you can use Software only to install/uninstall/update flatpak apps, and to update firmware.

1 Like