I was looking at my virtual machine Ubuntu 24.10 to see if there were any interesting changes to share with the community. That's what I have it for. I don't do much with it, just update it and compare, I have plenty of space with 2TB. Sometimes I also do some tests. Today I opened the Software Update app, saw that there are patches to fix the recently discovered vulnerability with CUPS and later I opened the Snap Store.
Seeing that there were two packages to update, Firefox and the Snap Store itself, I thought that having multiple ways to update things doesn't seem like the best experience. In theory, snaps are updated in the background, but even though Software Update finishes its work by saying something like "Updating snaps", the snaps don't seem to pay attention. So I updated Firefox, then the Snap Store with the terminal — you can't do it from the Snap Store — and I saw it disappear from the side panel. When I searched for it, What I found is “Ubuntu Software”, and the icon has returned to what it was months ago.
Ubuntu 24.10 Store also does not support flatpak packages
After opening the application, what I saw was a software store that looks like a carbon copy of GNOME Software. That's what it was like back then. It's the new Snap Store, as you can see in the screenshot, which is what opens when you type "snap-store" in the terminal.
Now, several things to keep in mind: the first is that does not support flatpak packages, at least right now. As the package is snap store and there is nothing like that snap-store-plugin-flatpak, there is nothing to be done. It is also not easy to imagine a future in which this will change, since Canonical will not implement it and since it is a snap package it is not possible to add plugins to it. At least not in an easy way.
It is also important to mention that even I have not found official information about this change. On paper, the official store, which they continue to work on and find on GitHub, it's App Center. Why has it disappeared when We are already in beta phase?
Since ChatGPT 4o is capable of performing searches, I decided to try to save some work and asked it, clearly asking it to search the Internet. The OpenAI chatbot has "confirmed" to me that this is a planned change, that "In the daily releases of Ubuntu 24.10, there has been a change to the software store. The App Center, as it was previously known, has been replaced by Ubuntu Software, which uses the GNOME Software design. This change is not just aesthetic, but also seeks to better integrate Snap application management and improve the user experience when managing applications and updates.«.
As always, the information seems reliable, but we must not forget the hallucinations of Artificial Intelligence. If you have really found something that speaks of change, you have not been right in giving me the sources.
Planned change?
The problem is that he gave me several links and in them there is nothing about Ubuntu Software being the official store again for Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole starting in October. In the official information, edited 2 days ago, we can see that the store section "now includes improvements to the management page, including«:
- Installations in progress.
- Improved auto-update management.
- Messages for running snaps.
- Direct uninstallation.
- Installation of third-party packages is also supported.
The name of the application that would be capable of all of the above would be App Center, not Ubuntu Software.
So the only thing that is clear is that nothing is clear. To find out for sure we will have to wait either a few days until things calm down or until October 10th, when the stable version of Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole will arrive and we will see which store is available.