Have a GUI to update from various sources and package formats

Brainstorm
1

You can install packages from official repositories, you can add ppas, you can use debget to install them directly from the developers github repository or website, you can install flatpaks , snaps, debs, appimages or install python packages with pipX.

Some sources handle tls connections, some can be upgrades, some don’t.

Depending on the source and format you need various helper tools to browse applications, install them or check for updates.

There are attempts to make this more usable with

GH: vinifmor/bauh

GH: mijorus/gearlever

and

GH: topgrade-rs/topgrade

but eventually it would be nice to have this available with a graphical frontend and in a single place.

Would discovery be a good common place to handle all of this ?

2

I doubt that, already it’s extremely limited for Arch.

3

GUI’s for updating can cause issues that don’t crop up updating from the terminal.

4

An app, people don’t see is not really useful.

Updates that you don’t see and don’t install can be a security risk.

What kind of issues are we talking about here? I am confident that they can be worked out.

5

Theoretically that should be possible.

Discover’s architecture already supports various different backends so that it can deal with traditional Linux package systems, Flatpak, Snaps, immutable images, etc.

Systems like Python’s PIP are probably closest to the traditional packages as many items are just dependencies and should probably not show up in a user UI like Discover.

AppImages are probably the odd one out, as they can’t be “listed” for installation and usually don’t come with information on where to check for updates (some update themselves).

Discover could probably still show the installed ones and allow removal but might need some disk scanning to actually find them.