Ubuntu software centre has always felt a bit lacklustre to me as a paid software place. Most of the stuff on the front page is either listed as free, have bad icons and screenshots (sometimes Unity,sometimes Gnome 2 or something else) or all 3.
Not to mention that the UI is kinda slow and clunky.
Basically gives the feeling of being in a neon lit discount store rather than a premier software showroom.
I think it might do better to get rid of it as an application altogether and just build an attractive webpage that gives a lot of space over to highlighting the best, most polished commercial apps with a handful of the higher quality open source desktop software. Use a browser plugin to trigger installation.
Installing open source libraries, dependencies and dev tools could be handled by a more utilitarian ncurses front end to apt or something.
Not to mention that the UI is kinda slow and clunky.
Basically gives the feeling of being in a neon lit discount store rather than a premier software showroom.
I think it might do better to get rid of it as an application altogether and just build an attractive webpage that gives a lot of space over to highlighting the best, most polished commercial apps with a handful of the higher quality open source desktop software. Use a browser plugin to trigger installation.
Installing open source libraries, dependencies and dev tools could be handled by a more utilitarian ncurses front end to apt or something.