Gnome Software has a rather serious bug that means that it is unable to uninstall software.
I ran across this on a fresh install of Budgie 10.6.1 - I can install software from the software center but not uninstall it.
For me, this is not a huge problem as I can just issue the apt commands manually, but as a user experience its not great, and I can imagine a less tech-savvy person might get very frustrated.
It appears that Gnome fixed this bug and backported it to 42. I’m not sure what this means for Budgie, but it would be good to be able to include this fix (since uninstalling software is one of those things people expect to JustWork™).
I had a quick look at this. Unfortunately the fix only applies to GNOME 42. In this particular area of code it looks to have been completely rewritten since GNOME 41 and I don’t see an obvious bit in the code where there is something similar to try and shoe-horn the fix in.
I’m not sure if upstream are backporting fixes to the GNOME 41 baseline. If would be great if they do.
Suggest raise an issue upstream - ask (nicely) if it is possible to backport the fix you have found to GNOME 41 or if they have any ideas how & where to resolve.
Since this is a “Universe” package - it has to be maintained by the Ubuntu community - Canonical will not help here. GNOME Software is used by all the flavours.
Thanks for taking a look. I’ll follow it up on the gnome-software repo. I might be misunderstanding, but it seems like the affected file (plugins/packagekit/gs-plugin-packagekit.c) is also in the gnome-41 branch, so I’m hopeful the fix will be doable.
good news I think - I should have read the bug report more closely on launchpad. It stated that the fix went into the snap-store-41 branch. I’ve just grabbed that and the specific fix seems to apply.
I’m going to try to compile with the fix - assuming it compiles and install, then test. Will let you know how I get on.
ok - fix seems to work. I’ll check on IRC on the best way to get the fix out.
Please subscribe to the launchpad bug report @rspencer01 - when the fix is ready Canonical will ask for someone to verify - you definitely can help here. Thx.
Thank you for taking this on. I didn’t quite get the distinction between GNOME’s repo and the launchpad mirror and also missed that the fix was in a suitable branch already. Subscribed to the bug and will test when it lands.
If it is being shown for Gnome, would that mean that it would also be working for Budgie as well? I have ran into this issue as well with software that I would install where it is saying that there is no package to uninstall for items. One instance is for Steam, where I have 2 different instances installed, because on one of them, it does not allow me to get access to drives that are outside of my Linux operating system and then I also have the issue with RetroArch to where it is not allowing me access to outside drives from my drive that has my operating system on it. I am not able to uninstall either of the problematic installs as I would be prompted with the error message of there being nothing to uninstall.
If so, then you need to « allow / authorize » those snap to access partitions outside the root system by connecting them to the removable-media interface, through « settings » :
Thank you for showing this as a way to check, I had apparently uninstalled RetroArch and when I reinstalled it from the Software, it was being shown as either flatpak or deb with flatpak by default and when I installed it as flatpak, it was able to see the drives. For Steam, I have 2 different versions that show on my system, one of them works without issue, but then the other one is the one that I had originally done that didn’t have access to the drives and when I open it up in software, it opens as the steam devices and I don’t have the ability to uninstall it, but only install.
I have blender on my system as both flatpak & deb, I am not able to uninstall the deb one as it is giving the issue, as well as the Steam install, I have the 2 instances installed with the one that works being the flatpak and the other is a deb, but not showing that it can be uninstalled. I also have Line installed through Wine, but I don’t know how to uninstall it, if I go through PlayOnLinux, it doesn’t show, how can I access programs that are installed through Wine to uninstall?
