This is admittedly a minor request, but it would be nice to be able to see the package name of any package I can find in the software store. I realize this information would be distracting or confusing to new Windows converts, so I would recommend hiding it under the show more break. It would also be necessary to indicate where the package comes from (snap, apt, flatpak), as the dropdown in the top right will tell the user what the options are/what they have installed, but the goal here is to ensure the user knows which name matches which package type.
The reason for all of this is so that on the rare occasion something goes wrong, it's easy to get the name of what you have so you can attempt to work with it on the CLI, rather than swim through a list or guess at grep filters.
My specific use case is that Document Scanner had an icon in the application grid, insisted it wasn't installed in Software, and I couldn't find its name in apt list or guess at the relevent .desktop file. The happy end is that installing and uninstalling via software store got rid of the shortcut, but it would have been nice to find the package name and just remove it.
Thanks. I think Zorin has made some alterations to the Software Store, but couldn't begin to guess where the line is on that, and you're absolutely right that this would be better as an upstream change anyway.
Tell me about it. When it makes software hard to find and remove (how could a user ever guess "Files" is actually called "Nautilus" if not being told by someone with long experience?), name changes are a problem.
Yes and no. The information is there, and I do use Synaptic, but if I don't know the name of a program's package, I can't find it in Synaptic either. Searching "document scanner" there returns a TON of packages if searching by description and name, and nothing if using any of the other options. Searching simple-scan, now that you've told me what it is, works perfectly, but having to know the answer to find the answer keeps Synaptic from being useful here. It's easy to find in the software store because I can right click "Show Details" in the application grid and be taken straight to Document Scanner in the Software store, thus my feedback that package names need to be visible there.
This is something Windows and KDE Plasma beat gnome on massively: right-clicking a program shortcut gives you an option to see the details of that shortcut, rather than it always directing you to the software store even if the program was uninstalled or never came from the software store in the first place!
If I right-click > edit application on VSCodium in my Plasma start menu, I get this handy window:
It tells me the name of the .desktop file in the title bar, the actual binary name next to the icon, and where the .desktop file is located a little lower down. On the Application tab, I also get the actual path for the binary, too:
gnome absolutely sucks, it's completely anti-user, Zorin should drop gnome and make Xfce or literally any other mainstream DE the default instead of planning to drop Xfce
A tremendous amount of the irritation behind my always referring to shortcut removal and Zorin's handling of shortcuts as a "pain point" has to do with this. If I right click on something, I expect to be able to interact with it. There's a reason "properties" is an option in so many modern context menus. A proper "properties" here would, at the very least, point me to the .desktop file, from which I could hunt down the application to which it points. I'm sure it's not the same mechanically, but it reminds me of Windows having shortcuts in the desktop shell namespace that weren't in an actual desktop folder, such that Windows was basically saying "we're putting this here, whether you like it or not."
I wouldn't go as far as "absolutely sucks," but I've always favored KDE, even in the very early days, and inch farther toward "GNOME sucks" every day.
Going back a stage, Document Scanner was present in Fedora's Gnome offering before Zorin because Fedora is known to be bleeding edge it will have adopted a newer Gnome Shell than Zorin. What we should remember is that what we should really be saying is that Gnome Devs really suck as opposed to the D.E., which is one reason why Antix proclaims to be anti-Fascist. When Devs of any D.E., start acting as if they were working for MS, it is time to ditch it for something else.
+1 on making a properly functioning "Properties" button. It took me months to get out of the habit of using properties in Zorin OS because of how it works in Gnome.
In this case, the Software store entry for Files actually has this information in the description:
Files, also known as Nautilus, is the default file manager of the GNOME desktop.
Most programs also have an "about" or "help" menu that displays additional information about it, like program version or links to a website, that often goes unnoticed.
I started on GNome. But after a few months, still very green on GnuLinux, I changed D.E.'s. Now, when I must use Gnome, it is the reverse, where I need to get used to things being missing.
That's a reasonable point, but it's also a manually entered description that may or may not include another name. While GNOME's Document Scanner does have simple-scan in its URL, that too is hardly a guarantee. Put another way, while trying these would've given me clues, neither is a trustworthy "this is the package name."
I'm still using GNOME (obviously), but after multiple decades of Windows, I'm still struggling to get used to so much missing in context menus.
Yeah, in this case it's just very strange how things work for this setting. I have to assume that this is done in order to ensure that you are redirected to the proper apt/flatpak/snap version of the package. But I'm sure there are better ways to handle this anyway.
This is very much true. Without experience seeing Gnome's names it can be very difficult to guess these things. I remember my first time trying Linux... I had to give up and go back to Windows because I couldn't find an obvious way to install the software that I wanted
A side comment. I installed Q4OS on my lady's pc and KDE Skanlite picked up the Canon LiDE 600 F scanner instantly, when in the past there was never a Linux driver for it.
