The Ubuntu developers have set up a PPA for anyone who wants to try GNOME Software in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and users have been asked to provide feedback.

One of the most interesting things that came out of the latest Ubuntu Developer Summit was the fact that Canonical wanted to ditch the Ubuntu Software Center for GNOME Software. This information has been very well received by the community, which is not terribly fond of that particular application.

In fact, users have been asking why GNOME Software isn’t available in the daily build of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The launch of this OS is planned for April 2016, so there isn’t much time left. It turns out that they have been working on this transition, but it’s not as simple as you might think, and a lot of things depend on it.

GNOME Software available through PPA

The Ubuntu developers are not yet ready to push the modified GNOME Software into the main Xenial branch, and there still a few problems that have to be solved before that happens.

“As you may be aware, we're currently looking at switching from Ubuntu Software Center to GNOME Software for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. We're blocked from pushing this directly to the Xenial archive, butwe hope to have some progress on that soon. I'm still working on the Ubuntu One support for posting reviews - ideally this would use libaccounts but that doesn't seem to be working in desktop Ubuntu anymore,” developer Robert Ancell explained.

In order to get the GNOME Software package, you’ll need to enter this PPA in your system (Ubuntu 16.04 required). Just enter this command in a terminal: