I have posted this as a KDE bug too
When intensely looking at the UX of discover, its not fully smooth.
Different UI in the Tabs
I will list the current tabs, and how they “feel”
- Start: perfect, loading icon and all. But why is it the only loading bar with stripes?
- Installed: Uhm why does it use a different loading animation? otherwise also nice
- settings: also good, some buttons appear after the list, is still loading UI something normally happening in Qt?
- about: quite nice, authors or button seem to slide out?
- update: again another loading animation, no stripes in the bar. Okay UX
A problem I have with the view of apps getting updated, that there is a slow bar going up for the Download of applications, which is very nice. But then after the download, the app is installed locally, that takes time but seems to give no feedback to Discover.
Download feedback is currently dealt with, was also not perfect before.
Proposal: Can the install process also send the progress information to discover? If so, another loading bar (or something more creative) could indicate that.
Currently, after 100% is reached, there is a pause of no changes at all. No movements in the color of the install bar, nothing. This is so flat! It gives the user literally no idea that Discover has not crashed, as it should clearly do something, and report that back to the user.
Then, release, the apps start to disappear, as their updates have been installed.
I would not make them disappear? F-Droid on Android does it differently, they are marked as “installed” but dont disappear. You can read update logs (which Discover / Flathub currently also dont support?) and see how big the install was, to what version.
Let people see “The work your Software store has done for you”, so that people say ‘Discover is a good software store!’
Then after the updates, you have a blank big screen, showing
updated
Thats it! not the apps with their versions, not the core OS Components like
- Distro version
- KDE Version
- updated apps
Could have a nice background appearance like desaturated text.
Also, when the “updated” window shows and you just wait, it seems that some backend initiates a update-check, so for a moment the screen is full with “checking for updates” and the progress bar show again. Every 3 min or so.
The exact same, but with clear percentage can be seen in the side bar, so this view is not needed. Why not keep the “updated” screen, avoiding this “flicker”, as it has already updated 3min ago?
Btw, is this a bug? Should either
- Flatpak: Flathub, Igalia, Appcenter, PureOS
- rpm-ostree Fedora
- firmware updater
- Knewstuff backend
- vendor directory (Lenovo)
- lvfs
cause update checks every 3 (!) minutes?
Discussion
I would like to discuss these UX behaviors. Are some just baked in to plasma? Are there people using random progress bars or loading dialogs?
I think the progress bars could be made wayy smoother. Like, organically loading, not like a piece of paper. I will just mention Apple anything, as they have the damn smoothest UI of all. There is no stopping anywhere, unless your PC is frozen. Every action should make your PC graphically interact with you. If there is an installation ongoing, this should be shown. Also the UI should feel well made and thought through.
Discover is working pretty great, now even on Fedora Kinoite thanks to @siosm !