I said it before: the adoption of GNOME 3 as “the” desktop was a severe betrayal of Ubuntu’s user base. But now Canonical goes even further in insulting the intelligence of the users of Ubuntu Linux, however little was left of the said intelligence! I didn’t want to mention this tiny fact after having read Joey Sneddon’s Ubuntu drops the ‘Software & Updates’ tool from new installs, but since Bobby Borisov wrote Is Ubuntu Treating Its Users as If They Can’t Be Trusted?, I thought I might reinforce the idea myself: yes, Canonical believes you’re too stupid to enable or disable repositories in Ubuntu!

As per Bug #2140527: Replace software-properties-gtk by software-properties-common in the desktop seed, reported by Jean-Baptiste Lallement, Director of Engineering at Canonical and Lead engineering for Ubuntu Desktop, WSL, and Multipass,

software-properties is an old gtk application essentially focused on deb/apt world. Many of its features are dangerous or too complex for normal users (removing main, enabling proposed, source without specifying what, …)

With the Pro tab moved to the security center, it should be removed from the Desktop image in 26.04 so we do not maintain it for the life duration of the release and only software-properties-common should be kept.

Keep the package in main as other flavours use it.

At least, they don’t plan to abandon it yet.

Oh, “focused on deb/apt world” instead of snaps, right, you motherfucker? If Debian died tomorrow, all of Canonical’s business would collapse like a house of cards, you arrogant shitheads!

For the time being, software-properties-gtk is still present in the latest daily build of Ubuntu 26.04 (also in Xubuntu and in Ubuntu MATE), and it still includes the Ubuntu Pro tab:

Kubuntu and Lubuntu use software-properties-qt, which has no Ubuntu Pro tab:

On the other hand, the Qt-based flavors don’t need it, as repos can be managed by Discover:

“What’s the importance of this tiny tool?”, you might ask.

On the one hand, it could be argued that “normally,” repos shouldn’t be edited by the end-users.

  • But how about the feature that lets the user select a specific server, either closer geographically or just preferred by the user?
  • And how about the fact that using a Linux distro is meant to empower the user, not to keep them stupid?

On the other hand, with regard to third-party repos, most users install them at the CLI, as described upstream in each case. Case closed?

Not quite. In the Ubuntu ecosystem, software-properties-gtk also fixes a side effect of Synaptic being de facto abandoned: it cannot edit “modernized” repos.

If the user accepted to modernize Debian’s repos (that is, to convert them to the deb822 format), they no longer show up in Synaptic’s Settings, Repositories:

Ubuntu fixes that by making Synaptic use software-properties-gtk!

OK, this tool isn’t going away; it just won’t be installed by default in the default desktop flavor, which is the abominable GNOME that’s clearly aimed at retards, because without installing gnome-tweaks, one can’t even change the typeface or the rendering of fonts!

So why would I care that Canonical finally takes the retards who love GNOME for what they really are?

After all, Synaptic is also not installed by default, because it’s definitely “too complex”! Canonical’s sheeple are supposed to use the App Center, whose “Manage” section only manages snaps, including the ability to switch channels!

Canonical is aligned here with Red Hat, which also doesn’t respect its users. In RHEL and Fedora:

  • Power users should use dnf, because dnfdragora is the most pathetic piece of software I’ve ever seen, and yumex-ng isn’t official (there is a COPR for Fedora, though). But even yumex-ng is much worse than the first-generation YumEx.
  • Regular users should use gnome-software (or Discover in Fedora KDE).

Ubuntu has App Center instead, which is snap-store, being itself a snap, and desktop-security-center, another snap. 🤦‍♂️

The graphical management of repositories, which was “dangerous or too complex” in the old tool, is supposed to be added to this Security Center, which so far is an empty piece of shit:

Maybe it’s time to rename Ubuntu Linux to Idiocracy Linux.

The only refuge is Debian. We need more derivatives built on Debian, not on Ubuntu!