Solus to get brand new and super-fast Software Center

A much-needed change in “Software Center” is coming soon to Solus. “Software Center” app which is used to download and install apps is actively being redesigned and revamped.

If you are a Solus user, you might have experienced the slow and unresponsive current software center, which has been around since 2013. Though it has received many updates, it is still not at par with the software centers in other Linux distros.

Solus Software Center as of 10th March 2018

New Features landing in Solus Software Center

The redesigned software center is a GTK3 app, written in Python 3. Therefore, it has all the exciting modern technologies and a solid base. We should expect a high responsive app with such technologies. Though there is no snapd support yet, the developers have got their foundation done to support it in future Solus updates (Solus 4).

Upcoming Redesigned Solus Software Center.

Let’s take a glance at the new features.

• New home view added, showing “New This Week” and “Recently Updated” apps
• Easier to navigate
• 16:9 aspect ratio and fully responsive design
• Super-fast loading
• No longer dedicated Third-party apps page. All these apps will be listed based on primary categories, for example, Google Chrome will appear in Web Browsers category.
• Highly threaded design with dynamic backend support added at runtime
• Better handling of queued install/remove apps
• No forced offline updates
• Native Solus apps show “changelogs” history
• Software Center will default the eopkg to autoremove behavior, meaning the system will automatically remove any dependencies of the software that are not used by any other packages on the system.

Software Center Autoremove Feature

• DoFlicky hardware driver tool will be replaced with an integrated solution in the Software Center. In the new system, Linux Driver Management plugin will communicate to all available LDM Providers for a device (such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960) and looks for all the plugins with that name. That way the developers can implement their own plugins!

Hardware Driver integrated into the Software Center

Exciting isn’t it? I think this is the right direction for the Solus OS. No matter which Linux distro it is, I feel “Software Center” should be on the top of the to-do list, focusing on the responsive and intuitive user interface. I’m not sure when is the new software center update coming, but this article will be updated when it eventually gets released.

Enjoy the below video showing a sneak peek into the new Solus Software Center, courtesy of Solus.