It’s a clever idea, but it falls under “wrong a lot of the time”.
Say the user uses the package manager to install something, shuts down the computer, and starts it up again 4 days later. Discover’s notifier runs in the background and notices something new. On what day was it installed?
In general, if you don’t have accurate information, it’s better to show nothing at all rather than maybe-wrong information.
That’s why somebody a long, long time ago invented scroll bars. Please don’t change Discover into Bazaar. It looks terrible. The way Discover shows the items is great, especially when sorted on name, you can easily scroll through the list and find what you want to use.
Agree. Agree in the sense of having one item per package name, but when there are more versions of that package it should be clearly marked from where it will be installed so it is simple to keep consistency in your used software.
I for example use Fedora Kinoite, an atomic immutable distro, which uses mainly flatpaks. I set it up so I only use Flathub flatpaks with the option --user, so they get installed in my home folder which makes it easy to keep them when I re-install the OS for what ever reason, or change to an other one.
Sorry, but these two arguments are not important at all. Why should I want popular software, or even worse software which is trending at the moment? I want software which does what I want/need, not what is popular or trending. If many people start wearing purple jeans with high heel boots should I do that as well because they are popular and it is trending?
Yes, that could be improved, not only in position and size but also in the way the bar is filled. I seldom/never see it reach 100%. This is not only in Discover but more software have this issue, the bar is not filled linearly.
Another option here could be to not search for a program name but for a more general description, like music player which would give you all the music players available. You can then open one, read the details, the reviews and after closing it you return to the list of found players.
There could be a huge improvement. Sometime I see an install button and next to it a selection button from where I can install the program, sometimes they are combined (when there is only one source probably). Clicking the wrong one is very easy. Always show 2 buttons:
No, please don’t do that. We have a nice GUI program to install software, let it do its thing without terminal output. You can also install software in the terminal through the package manager or using flatpak, or …
Except when something goes wrong and the software doesn’t install without giving any feedback or reason onto why. By default, the terminal output would be collapsed, so you can completely ignore it if you want to…
I still have another idea. The terminal output could be shown in a completely separate window. There would be a “Show Output” button with a “Terminal” logo. It would be just a simple, non-intrusive button. Users who don’t care can just ignore it.
Good point, should have thought of that myself.
I have never seen something similar in KDE apps, but other package stores, like the Mint Store, have a button to display/hide the output of the terminal when system updates. But hide/show can be added only to the dialog window. When you use the dialog window for updates, you cannot use the store when the system updates; it is problem for usability, because I (and maybe some other users) want to use Discover for installing/removing apps when you have Upgrade
Well, that is unfortunate.
I fully support the idea that users should be able to continue using the store while system upgrades or updates are in progress.
It might be worth discussing this with the other contributors to explore possible workarounds or alternative designs/layouts. If a workable solution cannot be found, perhaps the idea could be set aside.
I think it would be nice if we could have something like this, where could filter the list of installed apps by type. Maybe there could the the everything view, a view for graphical apps, one for just application support flatpak stuff for the people who want to manage that, and like fonts or something.
The other day I was going through my computer removing some unneeded apps and having to sort through all this irrelevant stuff is a bit annoying.
It is all about discoverability.
Consider if you were someone new to Linux. You don’t know the names of any software or even what you want. Providing popular software at the top helps you find what you are probably looking for more quickly.
For example, let’s say I wanted to install a web browser, so I search for “browser”. The top 5 results are:
Pretty sure none of those are what the new to Linux user was looking for.
Trending is even more useful for discoverability. When I was recently testing app stores, the trending sections showed me some software that I didn’t know existed and would never have searched for myself. For example, Kontainer which is a distrobox front-end. I didn’t even know there were distrobox front-ends so I would never have been looking for it if I hadn’t seen it in trending.
Of course you shouldn’t install software purely because it is trending. It about helping you find software, not blindly installing things because they are on the list.
It comes down to what you expect Discover to be. If you see it as a graphical package manager, that is a very different use case than a software store. Likewise, the expected UI for those two use cases would be different.
On opensuse 16, Discover is now the update notification applet.
Before this change, there was a notification applet that showed the updates and installed them in a simple and quick way.
Now the discover applet that shows that there are notification available. You click it and it opens discover, that will slowly check for updates AGAIN, and will slowly show a massage that there are no updates and them will show the updates. And THEN you click to update the packages. A time-consuming process that requests much more attention and interaction from the users.
Wouldn’t it be much smarter to change the default left click action on the notification icon to open an option menu (like it is with the right click menu) that you can choose from quickly update the system and resume working (and the option IS on the right click menu)? Or at least create a configuration option to chose to?
I know that this choice probably was done by the developers to force users to spend time on discover, but it annoys who is trying just to get his work done.
You won’t use discover if you do not have time for it. Forcing to open it will become annoying.
“Oh, but you just have to teach all of your users to right click on the update notifications” - That’s not intuitive :-/
hi, welcome.
when the system tray icon indicates there are updates, that means that when it checked (usually once a day or when you reboot) there were updates pending from one of the sources connected to discover.
if you then click on the icon it will open discover so you can review the changes before applying them in case any of those changes might be disruptive to your workflow (like kernel updates).
the reason it performs a second (seemingly redundant) check is because the status may have changed since the system tray icon was triggered and there may be additional updates.
you WANT this so that you have a clear picture of what is going to be updated when you press the button.
if you don’t want any of this interaction you can just set updates to automatic instead of manual.
I’d like a Discover command line interface. For example to upgrade plasmoids on the PC in my basement I currently have to go down there and run the Discover gui in person. I usually upgrade my rpm packages using “dnf” commandline via ssh, so I’d like a command line way to upgrade all the plasmoids over ssh too.
Hello, can confirm problem, when I click to tray icon, Plasma tries update information, after it say “Nothing updates”, after Discover updates again, and only after this I seen real updates list(flatpak)
Thanks for the welcome 
You are supposing a situation that a desktop is powered on for long periods without someone using it to justify the second check. But doesn’t it checks for updates after the update process finishes? If there are any new update during the process wouldn’t it be already covered by the check after the update (and the notification shows again)?
In my opinion, removing this check when the discover starts will make the update process much faster without loosing any update.
Or a timer could be added to check how long ago the updates were checked. If more then 20 minutes, then check it again, if not show the updates and wait for authorization
if you remove the check what will happen is that the whatever updates are pending will be installed without your ability to review them first.
if you are ok with that, just turn on automatic updates in the settings.
