Tired of gnome-software eating up your RAM, slowing your system? Souk – a new Flatpak app store that comes to the rescue.
GNOME Software is not in good shape right now. GNOME Software is the default “App Store” for GNOME Desktop environment which comes as default for many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. But it is a snap package (default in Ubuntu, Fedora) and it doesn’t work well performance-wise. There are reports that GNOME Software still keeps on using RAM while not doing anything at all. Its performance is slow on high-end hardware as well.
There are many reasons for it. For starters, it’s a snap app. Snap, by design its resource-heavy technology. Second, GNOME Software tries to do a lot of things apart from just installing and removing apps. It can update your distribution version, update firmware and managing packages, retrieve packages from distribution sources, snap store, etc.
All these functionalities also make GNOME Software in the state today.
Souk – a new Flatpak app store is in development at the moment by the Developer “Felix Häcker” – might be a solution to this problem that GNOME lovers face today.
Souk – New Flatpak App Store
The Souk app is written in GTK4 and Rust which makes it super fast. By nature the app itself is a Flatpak app!
When you first launch Souk – you can see the list of Flatpak apps listed by categories with Editor’s picks. You can easily scroll and browse your apps.
And by design, this app is supposed to work well in all form factors such as desktops, laptops, Mobile Devices such as Pine Phone or Tablet device PineTab. It has a responsive interface designed with libhandy package (A library full of GTK+ widgets for mobile phones).
While inside an application, you can see the usual information about the application such as version, source, description, screenshots with the install button.
An instant search option is available if you want to find your favorite Flatpak App. With a quick Install button, you can install your app and launch it directly from Souk.
This app is not trying to be a replacement for GNOME Software at all (from the developer’s FAQ). But it gives users an alternative to those who prefer Flatpak Apps and wants an easier way to manage Flatpak applications. I am not sure whether this app will be ready before the next GNOME 40 which is in development. Hopefully, we can get it soon in Fedora Silverblue to test this out.
If you like Souk, make sure to visit the development repository using the below link and contribute to the code, testing of the app.
Image credits: The Souk App video on YouTube. Check out the video for a demo.
Via r/gnome
