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.
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)
I like this style, reminds me of modrinth
They finally got Sopwith.
Top 60% of the screen is garbage. I hate app stores… This is why I use the cli.
/get off my lawn
Yeah just wish it would show the verified status in the cli, that’s the only reason I still go to the website
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.
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.
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.
