14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has a lot of products developed in house, but its developers rarely “kill” any of them, and when they do that, they usually have a pretty good reason. Taking the Ubuntu Software Center out back just because it's slow and poorly maintained is not really a good reason.
Alan Pope, one of the Ubuntu community managers from Canonical, talked a few days ago in a Linux Unplugged discussion (Freedom Isn't Free | LUP 107) about this idea of killing an app, and he explained quite a lot of things related to the development process.
One of things he said underlined why “killing” an application like the Ubuntu Software Center was a bad idea. There is no replacement. What are they going to offer users who just want to install a DEB in their distro? Some sort of GUI tool needs to exist, and the Ubuntu Software Center, for better or for worse, is still working.
We also need to take into consideration the fact that the Ubuntu Software Center is present in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is less than a year away. Whether they like it or not, the Software Center is still an integral part of the distribution.
Canonical rarely kills for sport
Retiring an application or a service is not unheard of at Canonical, but it's not something that's done lightly. The only thing that got sent to a farm upstate for a better life and that really stands out is the Ubuntu One file hosting service (along with the Music service), which was dropped by the company.
Keep in mind that they actually announced it and it was a big deal at that time. I'm sure that many of you will point out other products that Canonical sent to the big sleep, like Ubuntu for Android or Ubuntu TV.
Neither of those projects has crossed the River Styx. Both of them have been shelved, and Ubuntu devs have always said that they're not actually dead. In some cases, the code has been folded into other projects.
Focusing on mobile apps
Another thing that's been floating around is the fact that Canonical is somehow focusing on the mobile platform and mobile apps, and that is dead wrong. We can argue that Canonical is not the best communicator of information and that sometimes their intentions are not made clear to the Ubuntu community.
As it stands right now, Canonical is busy working on Ubuntu, and that's pretty much it. The thing is that this new Ubuntu with a fancy new Unity desktop, a new display manager called Mir, and a new type of packages called Snappy is only working on mobile phones (and some IoT devices, if we count Ubuntu Snappy Core).
The end goal is to have a single operating system that can run on any kind device, from the same code base. And yes, we're including TVs in this bunch. That also covers apps. Canonical is not focusing on apps; it's focusing on a way to make apps run on mobile and desktops at the same time, and that's a pretty tall order.
Back to Ubuntu Software Center
So, what's to become of the Ubuntu Software Center? Well, at this point no one really knows, not even Canonical. Its devs have their hands full with other stuff, but at the very least, the application might get ported to Python 3, for starters.
It's also true that many users don't seem to make the distinction between Ubuntu Software Center and the repositories. When you break it down, USC is just a GUI for the repositories, and those are the ones in pretty bad shape. It's also a problem that developers can't get their apps into the store, which is a DEB security-related issue more than anything else.
The bottom line is that it's far more likely for Canonical to keep the Ubuntu Software Center alive and kicking and bring it up to date for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS cycle, where they do need a tool like this one. Anything else beyond that is just speculation.