Pop!_OS' COSMIC Desktop Finishing Up Work On App Store

[mmstick]

I have reservations about calling the software manager the App Store because the word Store brings certain implications that a software manager doesn't like buying, selling, reviews, support, payment management, cloud services, user and system wide usage management, and more. Finding, installing, removing, and updating are just part of what an actual App Store is supposed to do. The word Store also implies that it's a For-Profit program where System76 gets a vig like Steam, Google Play, Microsoft Store, or Apple's service marked App Store.

Regardless of the implications of the word Store, Apple is sue happy and y'all are using their name. Y'all should probably call it anything else than the seemingly generic sounding App Store.

Narrator: It wasn't generic.

FWIW, I feel the same way about store.kde.org. It's also not a store. It's more of an exchange, repository, depository, library, etc. It's Discover on a web site. Speaking of which, the COSMIC App Store screenshot reminds me of KDE Discover with CSD.

The word "store" does not imply that everything within it costs money. It's the officially recognized name for a storefront that offers applications for download. The Google Play Store calls itself a store despite most of the apps being free. Unlike produce at your local grocery store, software is not a finite resource, so it needn't necessarily cost money to download.

[mmstick]

I was looking at https://whimsical.com/roadmap-iced-7...Lp3TmYH4WeYwLM to see what to expect from iced and unfortunate, it seems there are a lot of basic stuff missing. What the system76 people are managing to accomplish is stunning. Imagine what they will be able to do after all the foundation is stable and feature complete. I have never been so hyped since the Unity 8 days.

Iced is to libcosmic what GDK is to GTK. It provides a very lean runtime with rendering primitives that you can use to build your own theme system and widget library. It doesn't assume anything about the platform you are building for, so you may have to do a lot of boilerplate yourself. If you expect to have lower level details automatically implemented, and high level abstractions to work with, look to libcosmic.

In today's COSMIC blog update, there is a link to a COSMIC application GitHub template that developers can use to start building a COSMIC application today. You may also compare with examples in the libcosmic repository, and the applications that will be shipping in COSMIC.

[user1]

gio will thrash your hdds for literally no reason though.

I've used both Gnome and KDE and I haven't experienced any difference in hard drive usage between the two. Maybe it was an issue on old Gnome a long time ago? Because I remember hearing about something like this a long time ago on Gnome.

[BesiegedAce]

While I'm sticking to KDE, it's cool to see this project progress. Hopefully Cosmic can sap away users from GNOME that it really doesn't deserve.

[chocolate]

I highly recommend everyone to give `cosmic-store` a try. Whether you use COSMIC or not, it's fully functional on any desktop environment, and is already packaged for Pop!_OS, Fedora 40 (via COPR), and Arch (via AUR). All that it requires is packagekit for system packages, and libflatpak for Flatpak packages. Be sure to add Flathub to your system if it's not already there.

Didn't know it was packaged in Pop!_OS 22.04.
Just gave it a try.

It broke... my composure.
DUDE.
Just... how?? Everything I click is instant. A usable store. Wild. THANK YOU.

System76 CEO Carl Richell expressed his amazement at the speed of the COSMIC App Store: “I've used the terminal to update systems for years. But the COSMIC App Store is so fast, and lays out the information so well, that I found it's more efficient to update via the app than command line.”

Same. Finally, fast GUIs that work. YES.

[chocolate]

Been a while since a piece of software put a smile on my face. Laughed hysterically a little bit, watching my flatpaks update with a working progress bar (wild concept, I know) and no surprises or inconsistencies.
Can't believe I can ditch the flatpak CLI, whose text doesn't even reflow properly.

[timofonic]

COSMIC is improving at galactic proportions. KDE and GNOME, you're in big danger.

[skeevy420]

The word "store" does not imply that everything within it costs money. It's the officially recognized name for a storefront that offers applications for download. The Google Play Store calls itself a store despite most of the apps being free. Unlike produce at your local grocery store, software is not a finite resource, so it needn't necessarily cost money to download.

No, but revenue can be implied in something being called a store. That's why we get free software from the software repositories and all kinds of software from Stores. Repositories even call free software with the wrong license non-free. Stores call adware ridden programs free. Even Free has a different meaning between Store and Repository or OS Software Management. Free on the Steam or Epic Game Stores are a different kind of free than GPL Free or MIT Free from the RHEL or PopOS Repos.

They give out an annoyingly high amount of free food and products at my local Sam's Club. You can get free things from real world stores, too.

In my very next post I further specified between Stores and OS Software Managers:

Those have both Stores and OS Software Managers where one is a combination of adware, FOSS, and paid software from who knows where using certain guidelines and regulations and the other is the operating system software from the OS vendor. Linux equivalent would be Flatpaks/Snaps/AppImage/etc compared to Ubuntu's mirrors and apt. Windows has the Microsoft Store and a generic Apps in their OS settings that manages Windows exclusively. Stores and OS Software Management are different entities on those platforms.

There are different guarantees and abilities between Flatpak/Store programs and OS/Repository programs. One has a GUI permission manager, the other has chmod and learning SELinux policies. Putting them both in one place muddies the water and it's one of the reasons why software management on Fedora Silverblue sucks so much. For example, the combined method puts Repository Firefox right next to Flatpak Firefox. That can end up with very annoying situations when you get prompted to pick a default browser for blah situation and you're wondering which Firefox you should pick when they're both labeled the same in the picker.

It wouldn't be so bad if both sources, Apt and Store, Trusted OS and Random 3rd Party, didn't overlap and didn't offer the same software, but they do.

[You-]

Hopefully Cosmic can sap away users from GNOME that it really doesn't deserve.

Strange sour grapes here.

Anti gnome people have a weird obsession - they turn up in gnome topics to slag off gnome, but then also turn non-gnome topics to be about gnome.

just enjoy what they are doing with cosmic (or not - I suspect most of us have no intention of using it any time soon). It doesnt have to be about others. Judge them on their own merits.

[Quackdoc]

Strange sour grapes here.

Anti gnome people have a weird obsession - they turn up in gnome topics to slag off gnome, but then also turn non-gnome topics to be about gnome.

just enjoy what they are doing with cosmic (or not - I suspect most of us have no intention of using it any time soon). It doesnt have to be about others. Judge them on their own merits.

that is because gnome has generated a large amount animosity towards itself and with cosmic we have a real alternative to gnome not only in (hopefully) quality but also in general aesthetic. so people who are stuck on gnome but don't want to be finally have a place to go, and well. it's a public forum for talking about tech, people gonna talk