First, I will say that I did take another look at the package manager and yes it does list all installed and available apps from all my repos. The search tool works just like "yum list | grep [whatever]" which is nice. The 'Big List Button" generates a list that I could see might be imposing to a user, but if you have the viewpoint that users should not be installing software (I agree in a corporate environment) then who cares, right?

Rahul Said:
Generally users can install packages from groups which is provided as the primary interface or search and install any package they want. If they do want to list all the packages, then yes the choice might be intimidating to them. Do you have any suggestions to improve the user interface?

I think the checks are a good way of showing what is installed.  Not sure why there are two checks though.  It is very straight forward to click on the apps to install.

I would suggest putting a search box on the list window.  I found that you can type the first few letters of the app in and it goes to that vicinity in the list which some people seem to like.  A search box could also find key words in the description.  Combining the search a list windows would make sense.  You could do it like Thunderbird's "subject or Sender" search works.  Type in a keyword and only items with that keyword show.  Click the X and the entire list comes back in view.

Next, I would like to know where the app listed is coming from.  If I have a lot of repos set up, I might care.  Also, I would like to know if there was more than one repo offering a particular RPM, but I never tried that with yum....  A new radio button that would sort by repo or source would be cool.  At least showing the source in a column on the list would be useful.  I like that in the list function in yum.

Also, in keeping with other discussions about user privileges and software.  Something we do with a tool called Marimba on the windows world is to provide a list of apps that the user can install with other available apps grayed out.  To get access to the grayed out apps, they must make a request, but that way they can look to see if they exist on the YUM inventory.

Any chance of sorting the apps by logical groups?  Sort of like the package view, but with everything in the list.  I have not seen anything in the yum outputs that could be used to do that, but wouldn't it be cool.