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I was admittedly bearish about Bazaar early on; I was confused by the design that was trying to reinvent a lot of things, plus I didn’t know how I felt about diverging efforts from GNOME Software.
Now that the Bazaar team has decide to clone the Flathub web UI whenever it makes sense (and improve on it in cool ways!), I’ll admit it: it’s pretty rad.
Huge props to the designers and developers making Bazaar. It’s the Flathub app store @tbernard always wanted.
@pi_crew lemme fire up my GNOME phone…
This sort of demonstrates a super power of open source: you can contribute to and improve a project (like I know @tbernard did a lot with GNOME Software!), but if at some point you realize what you want is something fundamentally different—in this case, an app store client not beholden to all the distros' different packaging formats and multiple Flatpak remotes—you can take what you've learned and build or contribute to something else that does what you want. And the whole ecosystem improves!
@cassidy Please expand further on how “the whole ecosystem improves” here, because I don’t see it.
Don’t get me wrong: I know there's been a ton of effort poured into GNOME Software and I deeply respect the tireless and thankless work that folks like @pwithnall have been doing to maintain and consistently improve it. But I hope Bazaar helps ignite a bit of “coopertition” that drives GNOME Software to improve its UI and performance even more. :)
If I was making a Linux distro today, though, I think I’d push for Bazaar plus OS updates in GNOME Settings, though. 🤔
@cassidy To be fair, we spent the last 5 years cleaning up app metadata across the ecosystem and creating a curation pipeline, so it's much easier for a new app store client to look good nowadays :D
But yeah, huge kudos to the Bazaar developers for putting together something this solid and continuing to iterate!
@tbernard for sure, there's been a lot of work across a lot of areas to make this work. Also, I just kind of assumed you'd been involved in the Bazaar design; is that something you had a hand in? :)
@cassidy not closely so far, getting a bit more involved recently though. I was keen to try the new context tiles design somewhere and this seemed like a good opportunity :)
@cassidy overloaded name—apparently the popular Android app store in Iran is also called Bazaar (and of course, Canonical's now-deprecated vcs)
@ryanprior for sure, I think it could do with a rebrand. There’s an open issue to rename GNOME Software to GNOME App Center (sort of overloaded, but has come to be a generic term which fits the GNOME naming scheme). I don’t think Bazaar should take that name… but crazy thought: what if it was just rebranded to “Flathub” since it’s a native Flathub client first and foremost? 🤯
There’d need to be more thought put into if/how it exposes apps from other remotes, similar to elementary AppCenter.
@cassidy is Flathub protective of its trademark? (They should be IMO, as a distributor: you don't want confusion about the origin of your software)
And if they are, it would not be acceptable to let some dev call their desktop app "Flathub" just because it uses that as the remote.
@ryanprior I think you misunderstand what I’m implying… I think there could be a world in which Flathub “adopts” Bazaar as its native app store client counterpart to the Flathub website.
Full disclosure, I don’t know if that’s something anyone has considered or even would want—it’s mostly just me dreaming. But think about how elementary AppCenter is a remote, a website, and an app store client; we could do the same.
@cassidy oh yeah got ya!
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