KDE's Discover, Okular, Gwenview & K3B See Improvements

[bug77]

I've been trying to help you for days, so I don't appreciated the unwarranted rudeness. We may not have met in real life, but there are humans behind both ends of this conversation. If you wouldn't talk that way to someone in person, I would appreciate it if you would lend me the same courtesy. Thanks.

Anyway, there are two issues:
- Discover doesn't find include without at least one app backend installed
- Discover returns seemingly unrelated results a lot

I would recommend filing a bug with https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Discover whenever you see issue #2.

Again, you got it backwards.

You haven't been trying to help me, because I don't have a problem (since Discover I have gone back to CLI - apt, pacman, whatever). I have been trying to help you see how Discover is not only a poor application by itself, but it actually drags down the whole KDE SC. And I have shown you why. If you want to do something about it, great. If not, that's still within your rights.

And I assure you I have the utmost respect for open source developers. If I sound bitter is because Discover is simply a wrench thrown into machinery that was just getting things under control.

To summarize, as you have noted, there are "just" two problems with a piece of software that's meant to help users install software: it doesn't find the software and it finds lots of other crap instead. If that's not the definition of a failed piece of software, I don't know what is.

[ngraham]

I'm trying to fix problems like these. How would you like to help me?

[bug77]

I'm trying to fix problems like these. How would you like to help me?

By wishing you good luck Sorry, I don't have time to spare (my todo list has only been growing for a while ).

On a more serious note, I'm glad you're on it. For a while there, you sounded like you thought Discover was all peachy.

[skeevy420]

Because without packagekit-qt5, the only content it'll find by default is plasma and kde app addons.

Honestly it seems like if you want to use Discover, you probably shouldn't be using Arch. The distro is designed around understanding technical details; Discover's whole reason for existing is to hide them.

Now that I had a bit of free time, had time to catch up with this thread and I read the Arch bug report discussion, I have to side with them on the matter because I had planned to give Discover a go for a few days but my first system update made me go "nope" and I quit using Discover for repository programs because there is no output at all. My main reason is I install ZFS via DKMS so I rely on the output to ensure it updates correctly -- ZFS requires two kernel module sets to be built, one module set relies on the other, and DKMS has no dependency tracking so updates require strict monitoring and manual intervention if the ZFS modules build before the SPL modules.

I'd have this same issue if I were on Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or any other distribution regardless of using ZFS or DKMS -- 20 years of Linux experience has taught me to always monitor the output of updates and package installs. No way to monitor equals no usage for me....the only, and I mean ONLY, exception I have to that rule is Windows Update because I have no other system updating alternative on Windows 10 Pro.

I understand making it easier on the user and hiding the techno-babble from inexperienced users, but those same people are going to go to the internet and tell us "my system broke during an update", we'll ask them to post their output, and they won't have it for us technical users to help them with their problems. I'm of the opinion that making it too simple can make it more difficult in the long run on in the case of a worst case scenario.

Perhaps embedding Konsole in Discover would help...I'm not sure on how the alpm/packagekit stuff handles the updates and if an embedded Konsole could intercept the update commands to allow user intervention to satisfy the Arch devs...but even if it doesn't, just knowing what actually happened can help when the worst case hits.

That said, I have been using Discover for themes and everything else it provides. It's been working great for that.