Graphical Software Manager

[Australis777]

Being mostly a Win7 user I think that Maui Linux is the most attractive version of Linux I have experimented with.  I have run various distros from flash drives and have installed Mint KDE and Cinnamon.  I am on the verge of replacing Mint KDE with Maui 17.06 and will install it on a 2nd PC currently in progress (older hardware) and have successfully run it from a flash drive on that PC.

So far I have just one gripe and that is with the software manager.  I don't find Synaptic Program Manager so user friendly (interface especially).  I was hoping that some progress had been made with finding a more graphically informative and intuitive software manager such as you find in Mint and KDE Discover.  In March 22 it was stated that you are investigating alternatives.  I hope there is success with this in the next update.  It would be fitting in such a polished distro.  

[kdemeoz]

Personally i find Discover kind of sucky, but i do know that some people like Discover, so fyi, you can always install it if you wish. You could do it via Konsole, or via Synaptic [ironic, huh?]. Pic for the latter:
   

PS: There's also Muon, but if you don't like Synaptic then you'll probably also not like this.

[leszek]

Plasma Discover is the way to go I personally think so.
With the integration to Plasma and more services like snapd and flatpaks it will become the software center for Plasma based distros.

[Raydog]

If Discovery performs in Maui the way it did when I tried Neon, bad JuJu. Leszek, are you all testing it? It crashed every other search I did and couldn't find half of the others! SNP may not be pretty but it has NEVER failed me.

Interesting point about Snaps/Flatpaks though, I do think that is going to be the future trend.

[leszek]

My personal experience is that the newest version of plasma discover work better and better. But as you see in our current version we do not ship it yet.
Synaptic is a good piece of software but with a different target audience. It's a package manager and not so much a software center to discover new software.

[Raydog]

Very true. Maybe Discover will be ready for prime time by the next Maui update.

[Australis777]

If I may quote Starbuck2001 from March 22 "you're absolutely right that a graphical software manager is still missing. Unfortunately KDE's own tool Discover has issues which for such an important tool we can't ignore.
We are still testing alternatives, therefore maybe we ship either the mint store or Gnome Software in the future, after making sure it works the same under Maui as under Ubuntu Gnome or Mint." So it could be the Mint manager or the Gnome Software or we just wait for Discover to mature. Has anyone actively been looking at these?

[leszek]

Yes we took a look at them. Nothing was really good enough yet.

[kdemeoz]

Yes we took a look at them. Nothing was really good enough yet.

At the risk of being provocative, what about openSUSE's YaST?

[leszek]

At the risk of being provocative, what about openSUSE's YaST?

YaST is not a package manager but more like a complete system configuration suite. If you just mean the package manager part of it. Its just a package manager and not a software center.