I’m gonna be honest, 99% of what I need to do, I do through Discover. Like, why would I bother typing a command out when the update button is right there.
I think Flatpaks are the future for general user installed apps. It’s way more secure and user friendly for non tech people. I’ve even had some flatpaks run significantly better, like Brave, despite conventional wisdom saying otherwise for a browser.
this sane comment seems so hard for many Linix users to understand. I use LMDE, i want to click the icon on my toolbar and have zero interest in the OS itself
CachyOS now doesn’t even ship with Discover and if you install it there’s a banner warning you not to use it to update base packages as it can mess stuff up.
CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it’s fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don’t know enough about package management to know for certain.
Basically, I tried to install openrgb-next-git from AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn’t really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don’t remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.
This exchange was 2 months ago, so it’s possible that things have improved since then, but that’s not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.
What I’m about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.
A Shelly developer explained to me that it’s not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it’s more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn’t give me the half-baked vibe, I’ll happily give it another chance.
I actually like both Bazaar and discover. I enjoy using them to just browse for interesting apps. For linux to ever become adoptable for more people, good GUIs are absolute must haves. If you don’t like them that is of course fine, but it serves the greater good to have the option of using them.
Why and which did you use? I haven’t had an issue with KDE Discover. Pop Shop was ass a few years back but it works well now that it is “Cosmic Store”.
The GNOME one that comes with Debian is useless. There’s like 3 things on it and of course they’re all out of date (Debian thing). It also doesn’t work to uninstall applications. The Ubuntu one of course pushes snaps so it’s no good. The Mint one likewise pushes flatpaks. In general across all of them there never seems to be much listed on them, so going there to browse isn’t useful. I can’t think of any other specific issues but just in general over the past 8 years they are always buggy and annoying to use.
The Gnome store on Debian worked pretty okay for me, though it is a bit slow and always like, reloads the page you’re on after installing something, which is annoying. It uninstalled apps fine, AFAICT.
It had access to the entire Debian repo for me, so I’m not sure why only 3 things were showing up for you.
The Mint store has flathub enabled by default, but you can flip it off in the preferences. If flathub is enabled, it’s show both the flatpak and the native version from the repos, if available, allowing you to choose.
Most packages in Mint you can download from the system repo. You don’t have to use flatpacks. I have my LMDE set to show only system packages since i’m not a fan of flatpacks.
Linux software repos can usually be trusted to a far greater degree, and never come with odd malware toolbars or weird 3rd party ‘downloaders’ like windows install wizards can come with.
Ironically I liked Chocolatey package manager on Windows. Hitting update and everything just updates is great. I hate launching a program and it’s like “here’s an update you need to do before using this and if you kick it down the road you’ll forget about it till next time you launch me”
You can also download and double click executables that have no dependencies (like Pocketbase). The installation process handles resolving dependencies.
The built in “app stores” that come on Linux distros are also complete jokes, the ones I’ve tried to use anyways.
Not a fan of KDE Discover. Bazaar looks promising.
Snap store can get the hell outta here.
Discover is ok… If you limit it to only managing Flatpaks.
I’m not sure I’d ever trust a GUI to manage pacman/apt/dnf
I’m gonna be honest, 99% of what I need to do, I do through Discover. Like, why would I bother typing a command out when the update button is right there.
My discover casually uses 1gb of ram when i open it and after closing it stays at 500mb until i sigterm it
Synaptic is decent, but it doesn’t exactly feel like an “App Store”.
I think Flatpaks are the future for general user installed apps. It’s way more secure and user friendly for non tech people. I’ve even had some flatpaks run significantly better, like Brave, despite conventional wisdom saying otherwise for a browser.
this sane comment seems so hard for many Linix users to understand. I use LMDE, i want to click the icon on my toolbar and have zero interest in the OS itself
CachyOS now doesn’t even ship with Discover and if you install it there’s a banner warning you not to use it to update base packages as it can mess stuff up.
CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it’s fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don’t know enough about package management to know for certain.
Oh wild. I still just hit Cachy Update, because I don’t like Octopi, but I should try that out.
Tho I was considering giving NixOS a try
I was wondering about Shelly when I was reading the release notes for Cachy. What do you feel is flawed?
If you’re in the CachyOS Discord and have a lot of patience, this is where I dumped all of my complaints and feedback on the day that I really tried to use it: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934
Keep in mind I was pretty new to Cachy/Arch and coming from Linux Mint, make of that what you will.
More specifically, this is what raised the alarm for me: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934/1500507281840668852 and following messages.
Basically, I tried to install
openrgb-next-gitfrom AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn’t really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don’t remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.This exchange was 2 months ago, so it’s possible that things have improved since then, but that’s not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.
What I’m about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.
A Shelly developer explained to me that it’s not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it’s more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn’t give me the half-baked vibe, I’ll happily give it another chance.
updates, sure. let discover or gnome software do 'em.
my debian won’t break the system.
to install, though? i’d rather see exactly what’s going on. i don’t always want to bring in every tom, dick and recommend. i use aptitude.
I actually like both Bazaar and discover. I enjoy using them to just browse for interesting apps. For linux to ever become adoptable for more people, good GUIs are absolute must haves. If you don’t like them that is of course fine, but it serves the greater good to have the option of using them.
I’ve been using Baazar and like it very much! I find most things that I’m looking for.
Bazaar is the best app store for normies on Linux hands down.
Oh good. I fucking hate the snap store and thought it was my incompetence making it terrible, but here’s at least one other
The mint one takes like 2 minutes to start…
I gave you installed 1 soft with it, absolutely not simpler in any way.
But, I bet it will only (albeit slowly) be getting better, not worse!
You don’t compile everything from code yourself? Amateur. /s
I don’t know about you but I start an entirely new FOSS project every time I need some functionality that doesn’t come with the base OS.
Why and which did you use? I haven’t had an issue with KDE Discover. Pop Shop was ass a few years back but it works well now that it is “Cosmic Store”.
The GNOME one that comes with Debian is useless. There’s like 3 things on it and of course they’re all out of date (Debian thing). It also doesn’t work to uninstall applications. The Ubuntu one of course pushes snaps so it’s no good. The Mint one likewise pushes flatpaks. In general across all of them there never seems to be much listed on them, so going there to browse isn’t useful. I can’t think of any other specific issues but just in general over the past 8 years they are always buggy and annoying to use.
I haven’t used KDE’s store before.
The Gnome store on Debian worked pretty okay for me, though it is a bit slow and always like, reloads the page you’re on after installing something, which is annoying. It uninstalled apps fine, AFAICT.
It had access to the entire Debian repo for me, so I’m not sure why only 3 things were showing up for you.
The Mint store has flathub enabled by default, but you can flip it off in the preferences. If flathub is enabled, it’s show both the flatpak and the native version from the repos, if available, allowing you to choose.
I prefer flatpaks so Mint’s is OK by me, but admittedly I have yet to actually daily drive Mint. Fair enough on the rest.
Most packages in Mint you can download from the system repo. You don’t have to use flatpacks. I have my LMDE set to show only system packages since i’m not a fan of flatpacks.
Debian (GNOME) has a flatpak plugin that allows the app store to use flatpaks. They got a lot of stuff there.
The Linux Mint store has been the best IMO. Perhaps one day Cosmic’s store will out do it.
Truth. Fortunately updating and installing via command line is so easy and quick that I rarely feel the need to use Discover.
The Internet is my app store.
Who needs app stores anyway
Software is files, idgaf where they come from
Linux software repos can usually be trusted to a far greater degree, and never come with odd malware toolbars or weird 3rd party ‘downloaders’ like windows install wizards can come with.
Yea and I never accidentally installed mcaffe when running apt install…
Yeah that’s my only real complaint about Linux. I miss the ease of just downloading an exe and double clicking it
Ironically I liked Chocolatey package manager on Windows. Hitting update and everything just updates is great. I hate launching a program and it’s like “here’s an update you need to do before using this and if you kick it down the road you’ll forget about it till next time you launch me”
You can technically do that but app images have their own issues.
You can also download and double click executables that have no dependencies (like Pocketbase). The installation process handles resolving dependencies.
Oh that’s pretty cool I didn’t realize that.