It seems every man plus dog is trying to build an AppStore to mirror Apple's success. The latest comes from Open Source outfit Canonical which makes the user-friendly Linux OS Ubuntu. Of course the Linux fanbois claim that they had the idea first as Apple's AppStore is very similar to their idea of Linux repositories. However there is no doubt that the AppStore does things a lot better with an awful lot of software.

Ubuntu has decided to re-do their package manager frontend so that it uses a mixture of Synaptics, Add/Remove applications, UpdateManager and gDebi to fulfil its software needs. The idea has been on the drawing pad since 2005 and the Wiki has been dusted off recently, which has prompted some to talk about an Ubuntu AppStore.

The project codename is AppCenter, which is similar enough, you can't really say Store to an open sourcer as a store implies money and money is the turd of the devil. That being said, some of the applications will be sold for money. However the user can post reviews on every package, see a screen shot, get asynchronous download and installation and be much more friendly and explanatory.

One of the problems that bedevils Ubuntu is that although it is usually easy for a tech literate person to install something it is not suitable for the great unwashed, to whom turning on the computer is a challenge. Linux geek policy has so far been to flame such types and say that they have no business to be on a computer at all, however this does not seem to work that well.

Certainly if Ubuntu sets up its store, then it could go a long way to helping Linux popularity grow. However having wasted an evening installing the 64 bit version of Ubuntu only to find that it can't run Skype and then wasting a morning trying unsuccessfully to configure it so that it does, I don't really want to write about the damn operating system any more.