I had the same issue (packagekit worked fine until gnome-software re-opened, where PK will crash), and on a hunch I followed http://allnightburger.com/solved-gnome-software-center-frozen-in-fedora/ but for Debian:
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge packagekit gnome-software I noticed that the removal failed un-cleanly: rmdir: failed to remove '/var/cache/app-info/': Directory not empty So I removed the folder nroach44@woody:~$ tree /var/cache/app-info/ /var/cache/app-info/ └── xmls 1 directory, 0 files nroach44@woody:~$ sudo rm -rf /var/cache/app-info/ And reinstalled task-gnome-desktop (to cover the pre-reqs removed by autoremove above) sudo apt-get install task-gnome-desktop And then restarted gnome-software (left it running, whoops) and it started working fine. I figured it wasn't just a bug as my desktop (fully updated like this machine) didn't have the issue. Hopefully this helps narrow down the issue.
pEpkey.asc
Description: application/pgp-keys
