Insulting the design of software can be great fun. Unfortunately, you made three critical mistakes. First, you confused the design with the designer. Second, you did it in a bug report, making it measurably less likely that the report would result in anything being fixed. And third, the design specification is publicly available but you didn't even bother to read it to check whether it was actually a problem with the design.
If you had read it, you would have known that there is nothing about the design that requires USC to be online to install a .deb package. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#standalone-package> If there is any .deb particular package for which "Install" is greyed out, it is a bug. I just tried USC 13.10 on Ubuntu 14.04, offline, with several .debs. Where a dependency wasn't satisfiable, I got a message saying so, and no "Install" button at all. Where a later version was already installed, I got a message saying so. And with a .deb for the World of Goo game, I got a clickable "Install" button. So if you have a specific example of a .deb where it doesn't work, please make a less-toxic bug report with the .deb linked or attached. Thanks. ** Changed in: software-center (Ubuntu) Status: New => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1496136 Title: Software-center fatal design flaw To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/1496136/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
