R.I.P Synaptic ?

[KBD]

That's a recipe to make Debian worse... this pissed me off to no end, I took at look at gnome-software and I got horrified that that is the future.

I used Synaptic from the start with Linux (about 8 years). Even in Ubuntu the first thing I would do is install Synaptic. This is a serious regression if Debian leaves this out of the Stable release this summer. One more reason to stick with MX.

[skidoo]

The "deprecation" of synaptic is, more accurately, about pkexec (policykit)

Do you remember when those in control of Debian, on our collective behalf,
decided to abandon Debian's adherence to the (Linux Standard Base) LSB?
Maybe not, but now you're witnessing how those in control of Debian,
on our collective behalf, are continuing to implement "Our way, or the highway" tactics,
toward furthering the systemd + policykit (and wayland naturally follows) agenda.

An excerpt from one of my recent projects:

Code: Select all

/**
      skidoo thanks  ZETCODE.COM  for keeping alive the GTK2 tutorials
              http://zetcode.com/gui/gtk2

It's 2019. The guh-nome camp sez gtk2 is "deprecated" and they have
bastardized their pre-existing documentation by replacing each of the method descriptions
with boilerplate "this blahblah is depecated and should not be used in new code"
( without mentioning what, if anything, each is replaced by within GTK3 )

As of 2019, the glib GTK2 libraries remain part of the LSB (Linux Standard Base)
As for GTK3, LSB still regards the GTK3 libs as trial/experimental.
*/

pkexec provides an admirably granular permissions mechanism.
That's fine by me. What's not "fine by me" is the fact that policykit, true to form
(meaning, exactly as seen across Gnome projects), has already undergone "revisions"
which have introduced backward-breaking changes and...
"Hey, we call it 'polkit' now, and all your pre-existing stuffs is now deprecated"
represents a tactic intended to cause developer burnout across non-GnomeHat projects who might struggle to keep pace.

[dreamer]

I did a brief search and find no alternative GUI based package manager in the works for Buster. I guess if they wanted a simple method to drive Debian Desktop use down they may have struck on a perfect approach.

Debian never cared about the desktop. It's the only major distro without a community software ecosystem. openSUSE, Arch, Ubuntu and Fedora all have community repos available to users. MX Linux does all the work themselves which may guarantee better package quality, but also puts MX Linux and every other Debian based distro on an isolated island. It's possible to use the SUSE infrastructure and create repos for Debian, but it's not something that happens a lot. The strength of the community repos is that they are "user" generated and you don't have to get "into" a distro to make software available. This means more packagers and more potential users (distros). It's one reason we see many distros based on Ubuntu. The other reason is LTS releases. Those two things made *buntu the most popular distro and it still is with all the *buntu flavors, Linux Mint, Elementary OS etc.

I just want to mention this because we see more and more fragmentation within Linux and I'm not sure one distro (MX Linux) can achieve long-term success without more packagers/users than one distro can achieve alone. That ecosystem would be an alternative to Wayland/Gnome/Flatpak/(systemd) Linux that we see take shape before our eyes. Devuan comes to mind, but if there were major problems with a Debian Buster release the antiX/MX devs would have known by now.

Many Debian based distros went with systemd. Only antiX and MX Linux did not as far as I know. I think distros like Sparky Linux and Neptune OS might be more hesitant to adopt Wayland. Basically what will happen is that mainstream desktop Linux will continue to become more and more locked down and all Debian based distros will have to make up their minds how far down the rabbit hole they want to go.

Dropping Synaptic and enabling Wayland by default just shows how radical/"modern" Debian has become. I read that Ubuntu won't use Wayland as default for the next LTS release 20.04. Ubuntu has paying users and paying users demand functionality. I think that's the difference.

Canonical engineers feel that the Wayland support isn't mature enough to enable in the next year for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... -20.04-LTS

[KBD]

If Ubuntu thinks Wayland is not stable, scary that Debian does :(

[entropyfoe]

The way I see it, if Wayland is not compatible with synaptic, then Wayland is not ready for prime time.

Apparently Ubuntu agrees.

[skidoo]

If Ubuntu thinks Wayland is not stable, scary that Debian does :(

Wait, it is stable*. It's been well-tested by several brocolli-smoothie-sipping Gnome users.
If you're running Gnome 3.20, you can expect everything will be fine. If not, well... not our problem, get outa here (debian)


.

.

.
* as tested with a select group of Gnome desktop applications. If you have not yet been fully assimilated and would insist on running any of the thousands of pre-exisitng linux desktop applications (or last week's deppppacated v3.19 versions of any Gnome applications), be advised that Xwayland support remains painfully incomplete.

[BV206]

Does gnome-software work on xfce?

[dolphin_oracle]

Does gnome-software work on xfce?

it should.

but you know, synaptic isnt' going anywhere just yet in the antiX/MX family.

[anticapitalista]

Does gnome-software work on xfce?

it should.

but you know, synaptic isnt' going anywhere just yet in the antiX/MX family.

Neither is gksu (at least on antiX).

BTW synaptic is now in the antiX/buster repo.

[rasat]

They should dump Wayland, not Synaptic!

+1.. also my first thought.
Gnome-software, nice for kindergarten same as most of Gnome apps.