The “software” module was added to the Community Website.
The old “Software Portal” available for Mint 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 users contained approximately 400 applications. It was integrated with the main website and it was using the .mint format with mintInstall.
The new module contains every single package available in the repositories. So for instance, right now, it shows 30,592 packages. It’s integrated with the community website and it uses apturl which will come pre-installed in Linux Mint 9. It will also allow the new upcoming version of mintInstall to review packages straight from the application.
Reviews
Reviews now relate to packages, not to releases, so if you review a package now, your review will continue to be available even Mint 9, 10 and so on get released. You can see how long each review was done so obsolete data isn’t an issue. At any time you can update your review of a package and reset its timestamp. As a consequence we’re hoping to get a lot more reviews from the community in this module than we previously had in the Software Portal.
Screenshots
Adding screenshots is going to take us some time, and it would be unreasonable for us to add screenshots to each of the 30,000+ packages.
At the moment, only Opera has a screenshot: http://community.linuxmint.com/index.php/software/view/opera
Our goal is to add as many screenshots as possible and depending on the time we have, we’ll add 100, 200, maybe 500… screenshots.
Of course we won’t waste time selecting which packages should have screenshots, and which shouldn’t. That’s your job
We’ll wait for you to review the things you like and the things you don’t like. Then we’ll take the top 100, 200, 500, and we’ll start adding the screenshots.
Feedback
Happy reviewing, and don’t hesitate to give us some feedback.
