14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu MATE developer Martin Wimpress announced that, in collaboration with Luke Horwell, he plans to revamp the Software Boutique default graphical package manager of the Ubuntu MATE operating system.
It's been a while since Ubuntu MATE's Software Boutique received any major changes, but it finally looks like it will get some much-needed attention as developer Luke Horwell gave users a sneak peek to the upcoming Software Boutique version that'll be shipping with Ubuntu MATE 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) later this year.
And the biggest seems to be the implementation of support for Canonical's Snappy technologies, replacing the old and unmaintained aptdaemon backend, which is currently used in Ubuntu MATE's Software Boutique to let users install packages from the default repositories, with snapd-glib to allow installation of Snaps, a universal binary format for GNU/Linux distros.
"Why the change? Well the old Software Boutique uses aptdaemon to install packages from apt repositories and aptdaemon is being deprecated," says Martin Wimpress. "Therefore we've added support for snaps via snapd-glib (thanks to Robert Ancell) and debs are now handled via PackageKit."
More robust queuing system, theming support
Apart from shipping with support for Snaps, which will bring more quality apps to Ubuntu MATE, the new Software Boutique should implement a more robust queuing system, theming support, per-app translation support, the ability to search Snaps and the entire archive of packages, as well as support for community members to leave comments or reviews for apps.
It also looks like the revamped Ubuntu MATE Software Boutique will be capable of fetching the curated collection of Ubuntu MATE apps it offers to its users from an external database for more secure transactions and a faster update process. In his latest post, Luke Horwell also revealed the fact that the Software Boutique team plans to offer support for Web Apps and a nice selection of themes.