Babe wake up, new flathub frontend just dropped
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Your comment got me thinking... Is this a big deal, or even a small deal?
I think it's a deal of some proportion. If someone is trying out Linux for the first time and stumbles across how Flatpaks work and starts exploring Flathub, maybe their initial impression will be good enough to consider switching. If something appears to be polished, then maybe it is.
Actually- yeah.
Perception is reality; while hardcore nerds are willing to roll their own distributions, there’s a reason Ubuntu is damn popular. Most normal people want their computers to work, and to have an easy discoverable ecosystem.
So yeah. A Big deal
huge deal, software discoverability is one of the worst issues in linux rn.
The flathub website is pure UX garbage so I wouldn't count on any improvements in discoverability. 😄
What of its UX is garbage?
Genuinely curious, genuinely asking.
I've explained in another comment. They have these pages that seem arbitrarily made up to fulfill certain needs but not others.
You can get a list of packages sorted by popularity and with paging, but no filtering.
You can get a list of packages with filtering but it's limited to 1,000 packages for some reason, no pagination, and no sorting.
The way to find these lists is really unintuitive (go on, try to find the second one I mentioned).
There's no package count, unless you find the filter page and add up certain categories (I'm guessing they have about 2,600 packages but it's just a guess).
I have no idea why they can't just put everything I mentioned in one place. There's no reason they can't have a page with search, categories, sorting, pagination, and counts. I struggle to think why this one page can't be the homepage (with whatever defaults they think it makes most sense, like most popular packages first by default).
Having a homepage that only shows a handful of categories and a handful of apps in those categories really hurts discoverability. You'll never be able to find an app like Stellarium for example if you don't already know its name – and this applies to the vast majority of those 2,600 apps, and it will only get worse as they add more.
I'm guessing they made this design back when they had very few apps, took a lot of time to release it, and by the time they did it was already outdated.
KDE Discover? Surely looks better than whatever this is
I hope it will change software discoverability on linux for the better.
TurboWarp looks suspiciously like Scratch
Yes, on the website you just put the scratch url in and it compiles it to JavaScript
It’s basically just an improved alternative to phosphorus
@AdrianTheFrog oh that’s pretty cool. Old popular (& well made games) could be ported to an app using that
Just realized I've never used the flat hub website
I always check if the was packaged by the developer. I tend not to trust apps packaged by someone else.
I always check if the was packaged
the gnome app store shows the verified status of apps, im pretty sure the kde one does too
It is useful to check the manifest file, some developer list additional setup guide and options in their github readme.
I like this style, reminds me of modrinth
It's the Gnome/adwaita style. There are many apps (on flathub) which have it too.
Comparisons kills the art
Top 60% of the screen is garbage. I hate app stores... This is why I use the cli.
/get off my lawn
It's the beauty of Flatpak, works both ways no prob
Yeah just wish it would show the verified status in the cli, that's the only reason I still go to the website
You have 2 other options:
- Gnome Software
- Create a TUI
Looks nice
Lol how the fuck do you browse packages? Did they forget to add a link to "apps" or something to the top menu?
You have to keep scrolling down the front page and look at categories and maybe press "More Productivity" and you get to see the packages in that category. But you can't browse all packages and you can't get a list of all categories.
What about the search bar at the top? It has category filters as well.
I'm not seeing any filters? If I press the search field I just get a prompt.
I saw there's a slash sign in a square but I can't figure out what it's for. If I click it it dissapears, if I type "/" in the bar I get nothing.
Edit: so if you press the search button with nothing written you get to https://flathub.org/apps/search which is a somewhat more useful page. The default listing there is still garbage because it's hard-limited to 1000 apps for some reason but there's no pagination and no sorting(?). But at least you get a filter bar on the left so there's that.
Also if you scroll aaaall the way down to the footer of the page there are some links to "collections" such as "trending" and shit. Which has pagination but no filters and no sorting. 😆 And the distinction between the "trending" and "popular" collections is left as an exercise for the user, I suppose.
It's like it was designed by someone who's never seen or used a package repository in their life.
Yeah, it really is more like google play store or shopping websites and similiar apps/websites (although there are some that have a better design I guess). I'm not really a fan of it either, but I guess people being used to those (which is probably the majority of the userbase of flatpak) feel more comfortable with it.
My guess with the difference between "trending" and "popular" is that the former means lots of recent downloads and the latter a lot of downloads in a longer timespan (e.g. a year or so)
They finally got Sopwith.
Yet, we still don't have a proper way to mirror the parts (or the entire) repository and/or have useful offline archives of flatpaks for certain cases.
It's not supposed to compete with actual package repos so not sure if it would benefit from something like that. The whole thing is amateur hour, amateur implementation mainly targeted at beginners and niche use cases. It fulfills a very specific need and does it well and at the end of the day that's the Unix philosophy. So I don't think it should try to be something it's not.
While I share your views about being amateur hours we've been seeing an increase in usage and releases on it. At this rate flatpak/flathub will become the defacto way of getting desktop software for Linux and it does solve a lot of annoyances and makes things more secure however it lacks features.
Even if it becomes super popular it doesn't have enough packages. Very small amount compared to distros.
The security in theory could be good but between not knowing who packed an app and the containerization rules being configured very lax by default it's not so great in practice.
I wish one of the serious distros experimenting with immutable distros would pick it up and start using it properly.
It's also competing with install methods like AUR or other native stuff that's better integrated, depending on distro.
I think it's too early to say it will become the preferred way of getting apps, all things considered.
Can't you just use github API? everything is hosted on github.
You can basically list all the package under the flathub org, git clone, and build them.
... that can be said from apt repositories. But... they're made in a way you can mirror the entire thing offline.