Today I wanted to play a file in totem that required gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-fluidsynth. Videos offered to open GNOME Software, and took me straight to the gstreamer package I wanted. The codec installation experience was almost flawless, expect for one problem: Software installed the lash package (which apparently is a dependency), which contains the desktop file lash-panel.desktop. Now I have a new application LASH Panel installed, but I don't know where it came from. Is it a virus?

I know we consider this to be a packaging error, but Software ought to be more robust to such issues: it's just not OK to silently install new applications on my computer. One option would be to not show the codec at all (just hide anything that depends on any package with a desktop file). Alternatively, Software could have presented an error message when I attempted to install the codec, but I don't think this is a great approach because there's no need to tease the user with uninstallable software. A third option would be to explain that installing the codec would require the installation of this new application, but that's not a good approach either because it's a terrible user experience for codecs (or applications) to depend on applications, and we shouldn't allow that.