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[SOLVED] Software Manager does not start

Recently (Linux Mint v18.2, January 2018) Software Manager has stopped working.

When launched, it asks for my administrate password. When entered, the password window goes away, but the Software Manager never appears.

If your Software Manager stopped working around this date (or the date of the update, more on this below), then you may be experiencing the following issue:

Solution #1: Software Manager should no longer be run in administrative mode.

To confirm, right click on that shortcut and select Properties. Command: line probably says "gksu mintinstall".

You can collect some information from the program launch by pasting this into the Terminal. The Terminal will probably say

"The software manager should not be run as root. Please run it in user mode."

This is new behavior, after Software Manager has been recently updated with new GUI. The solution to this problem is to just delete the "gksu" portion from the shortcut.

Solution #2: If this does not solve your problem (give Software Manager 10 seconds to start, and make sure you are not running Updates / Installs at the same time), run:

"file /etc/apt/sources.list"

Terminal shall output "sources.list: ASCII text". If it doesn't the file has been corrupted. Rename to something else it so that it can be re-created.

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