gpk-update-viewer is installed by default on openSUSE GNOME systems and
periodically shows notifications about package updates. Unfortunately, it does
have a tons of weird UI bugs that not only make the software feel unfinished
but also make the desktop itself feel unpolished.

One of these issues is the way that the package list behaves while
gpk-update-viewer manages the installation of packages:

* Patches consisting of multiple packages become unbundled and suddenly all
  packages that the patch consists of show up individually in the list. That
  is confusing.

* The list flickers and skips around like crazy. Trying to click any item in
it,
  you never get the item you wanted because the list always changes under your
  cursor.

* During download and maybe also during unpacking (I don't understand it), the
  download size counts down to zero (= where zero means fully downloaded/
  installed). That already is confusing, however, for large packages it gets
  worse, as they will always start from ~42MB of size, count down through to
  zero, go to their actual size and then count down to 42MB again.

* Ultimately, despite the cutesy icons of packages being opened, you never
  actually what is happening.

None of this is appropriate behavior for a default system component that users
periodically have to interact with and which can't be uninstalled without also
uninstalling important GNOME patterns.

Ubuntu's package updater solves this in a much nicer way: By default, it shows
just a progress bar. If you want to know more, you can click an expander and
you see the terminal output of dpkg.

As a first step, I'd suggest that during the update process, gpk-update-viewer
should just switch to a simple progress bar. Given how awful the current
visualization of updates is, a simple progress bar is just as informative and
at least does not look like one huge bug.

In a second step, it could either show which package is currently being
downloaded/unpacked or a command line view in addition to the progress bar.