Following the speed improvements coming with the previous update, additional fixes and features were added to the Software Manager today. We strongly recommend you update the mintinstall package to version 7.1.6 using the Update Manager.
Changes:
- When showing a package, the Software Manager now only lists the 10 latest reviews. A link appears at the bottom of the page which you can click to see all the reviews.
- When showing a category, the Software Manager now only lists the 500 most popular packages.
- The communication between The Software Manager and the APT daemon now takes place entirely in the background, making the UI more responsive, in particular when you click the “install” or “remove” buttons.
- A new option called “Open links in the web browser” was placed in the “Edit”->”Preferences” menu so you can choose whether to visit the packages websites within the Software Manager or using your own browser.
- Bug fix: Double-clicking or clicking multiple times on a category or any other element of the UI does not result in duplications of elements in the navigation bar anymore.
Notes:
On the computer on which the Software Manager is developed, it used to take 43 seconds for the “All packages” category to be displayed. Although the data is already loaded in memory, GTK is relatively slow and rendering 30,000 rows in a table takes a lot of time. This new version of the Software Manager now only shows the 500 most popular packages in the category. On the same computer, the “All packages” category is now displayed in 1.3 seconds.
We could argue that functionality was lost since browsing through categories now doesn’t show all the packages from that category anymore. But browsing through a long list of 30,000 rows isn’t particularly useful to anybody. We can still browse through the top-500 for each category and reach particular packages using the search feature.
This update introduces two new localized character strings which will be displayed in English until new translations become available through an update of the “mint-translations” package.