From OMG UBUNTU!
The decisions were taken at a recent desktop Sprint held at Canonical HQ in London.
“We are more confident in our ability to add support for Snaps to
GNOME Software Centre (sic) than we are to Ubuntu Software Centre. And
so, right now, it looks like we will be replacing [the USC] with GNOME
Software Centre”, explains Ubuntu desktop manager Will Cooke at the
Ubuntu Online Summit.
More from PCWorld
This isn’t huge news if you’ve been keeping track of the increasing deterioration of the Ubuntu Software Center. This summer, I chronicled how Canonical was slowly letting the Ubuntu Software Center wither and die. The paid “app store” side of it was axed with no warning to developers. Ubuntu MATE 15.10 already dropped the Software Center for something better.
The Software Center was great when it was released, offering a more user-friendly “app store”-like interface for installing Linux software. But it has stagnated and is rather slow. Other applications—particularly GNOME’s Software app—have caught up. Ubuntu’s developers haven’t really been working much on the Ubuntu Software Center, after all. They’ve been working on the next-generation app store for Unity 8, which works on Ubuntu for phones and will eventually arrive on the desktop with the converged Unity 8 desktop.
GNOME Software to the rescue
If you’ve ever used Fedora—or just seen screenshots of it—you’ve
probably seen GNOME’s Software application in action. Fedora, a fairly
GNOME-centric Linux distribution, was the first to adopt it.
This will give the traditional Unity 7 desktop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS a
stable software center that other people are working on and
maintaining, freeing up development time. It’s also more modern, and
Ubuntu’s developers feel it would be easier to add support for those
new container-like Snappy packages to GNOME Software than to the old
Ubuntu Software Center
Hope it helps!
It will be safe to remove gnome-software, apt tells me it will only take out the package gnome-software and nothing else, I tried it, it was removed and the system is fine
sudo apt purge gnome-software
To add the old one back run
sudo apt install software-center
All packages will be exactly the same, it is based off you repositories, not the center its self.
Best Answer
Only there is a difference between GNOME Software Centre (
gnome-software) and Ubuntu Software Centre (software-centre)Of which GNOME Software Centre is created by the gnome project where they added support for Snaps to GNOME Software Centre instead of Ubuntu Software Centre
Meanwhile Ubuntu Software Centre (
software-centre) is created by Canonicals as a user-friendly way to discover and install apt packages (friendlier than Synaptic, which was the package manager at the time).Where as the latest Ubuntu release is shipped with
gnome-softwareby default.