It would be great if distro packages like rpm’s and deb’s can be installed graphically - without using the terminal. Therefore allowing for a similar installation process to exe files on Windows and dmg files on macOS.
In my view this is a major obstacle for Linux adoption by the average person.
Since I can’t see how I would be the first one to have this idea.
What prevents us from making this possible (so far)?
GNOME Software can open and install local RPM and deb files, but this might not actually be very useful in practice since you normally want to install packages from your distro’s repository rather than local packages. It is sometimes useful for development and testing purposes, though.
In my view this is a major obstacle for Linux adoption by the average person.
Problem is installing packages allows nontechnical users to break their computers in creative ways. Packages are very complicated and I don’t think it’s appropriate to expose them in our software center. However, if you disagree, there is the old gnome-packagekit application which still exists. That is the predecessor to GNOME Software, and it allows installing arbitrary packages.
Also, there are specific software to manage packages itself, like Synaptic for APT and DNFDragora for DNF.
But I also think there better in their own specialized software, rather than GNOME Software. For a normal end-user, you’re focused on applications, packages and dependencies are only technical stuff needed for this, but not that relevant to the user.
Thank you for your responses and suggestions.
To be clear, this question is not aimed to address an immediate personal need.
In my view Linux is not accessible to the average user, and I have a strong wish for that to change.
Presently I assume that we may never have a single gold standard for installing applications on Linux and that distro package formats will continue to be used. Therefore, I make the followup assumption that Linux may only become accessible to the general public when applications packaged in distro formats can be installed graphically.
This is an attempt to explore why this is not presently possible, and what may be done about it to make it possible, and if there is something I can do.
I acknowledge that this may not be the right place for this discussion. But I don’t know what is. I have yet to find a solution.
While focusing on the obstacles first, I have the following conclusions:
Would you agree with these statements?
Anything missing?
This is exactly why GNOME Software was designed without support for package management. 10-15 years ago GNOME reached a consensus that users shouldn’t be exposed to packages anymore. This is achieved in our graphical applications.
I think we have pretty wide consensus that user-friendly Linux needs to be based on an immutable base system with no traditional package manager, like Fedora Silverblue. But even these systems still allow overlaying packages. GNOME OS is an exception; no overlays are possible there.
But Flatpak exists and has solved this problem. The gold standard nowadays is Flathub.
This is still possible. Don’t you see lots of packaged applications in GNOME Software? If the distro package provides appstream metadata, then it will appear in GNOME Software and will be installable.
But low-level operating system packages without appstream metadata do not appear. The goal is to expose only applications and a few “add-ons” (GStreamer codecs, fonts, input methods) and allow installing arbitrary distro packages.
Honestly it looks like you’re describing how GNOME Software already works on most distros: you want it to show packaged applications but not arbitrary packages, which is what it already does, so I assume something is wrong and you are not seeing packaged applications for some reason. Are you using a distro that doesn’t provide appstream metadata, perhaps? If so, then GNOME Software would not show any distro-packaged applications at all. I haven’t actually heard of any distros shipping GNOME Software like this, though.
I appreciate the elaborate reply.
I find it difficult to pinpoint a single major cause for why I continually feel the necessity of installing software using the terminal (all though I thought I had one). and I don’t want to overload you with descriptions of use cases.
It is probably better for me to discontinue this exploration as I feel like I am too ignorant about this topic to be of any use.
There are a lot of reasons users still need to install software using the terminal. It’s probably fine to expect users to use a terminal to install terminal stuff. But for everything else… well, I don’t know. We can think of each case as a defect, I suppose, but it’s probably not possible to fix every such case.
Well that’s a little harsh!
You might be interested in GNOME OS, where it’s really not possible to install packages.
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