Season's greetings to everyone. I have used the opportunity to perform an upgrade from 22.04.5 LTS to 24.04.1 LTS as I got a pop-up message inviting me to do so.
As I have the time today, I confirmed the upgrade which seemed to have been running fine, and after further updates of the 24.04.1 LTS version, I noticed that I cannot open the " Software Boutique" application under the " Control Centre/ Administration" panel.
Simply clicking several times on the "Software Boutique" labelled does not launch the application 
I have double-checked the Release Notes, and have been able to add the "Snap Store" following the instructions given with the Install Snap Store on Ubuntu article and have fired the following command on the terminal:
sudo snap install snap-store
I have followed the instructions given in another post, and have been able to remove the "Software Boutique" and the "Welcome" icons by firing the following commands on the terminal:
sudo snap remove software-boutique
sudo snap remove ubuntu-mate-welcome
Everything is good for now 
Will check the new upgrade further...