Purism Announces "PureOS Store" As Software Store For Their Smartphone & Laptops

[Weasel]

Disgusting. Yet another centralized garbage.

[tildearrow]

Disgusting. Yet another centralized garbage.

You don't have to use it.

[phoron]

This is imo part of "well curated": a store cannot be well curated, if software packages are not built correctly. So, most likely, Purism needs to insist that all software packages need to have assigned maintainers.

I don't know whether I understood you.

Well, in my view the best experience for the users comes from having distro maintainers for each packages and upstream maintainers (authors) for the programs. The distro maintainers know the distro and select versions, patches and build options to fit. And there's also the community. When lots of people use a build (moreover, use the same set of builds together, i.e. a distro), it is easier to find bugs and rely on everything working. If they put programs in a store, even if requiring the authors to maintain the programs, software may not be so suited for the distro, may be less integrated.. . Even an app including their own versions of libraries instead of using the distro libraries can create bloat.

So I still prefer traditional distributions and their repositories. In as much as this "vague" (but often disappointing for me) Store concept ressembles a lot a distro repository and a distro community, then it may be ok. But I wouldn't bother naming it "store" then.

[Weasel]

You don't have to use it.

Yes, but I can still proclaim my disgust for it, since it's all they can think about instead of, idk, fixing distribution properly. Decentralized.

[tildearrow]

Yes, but I can still proclaim my disgust for it, since it's all they can think about instead of, idk, fixing distribution properly. Decentralized.

The decentralized model works well for desktop/laptop computers, but not smartphones/tablets (or at least hasn't been tested yet since every big-name smartphone/tablet/PDA always came with a centralized store...).

But since this store caters desktop as well, you have the right.

[slalomsk8er]

The batches look ridiculous and devoid of information.
Either the press release is badly written or the system needs work.

On the topic of app-stores.

I can see two reasons for them.

1. give users a cleaner view of the repository without the clutter of libs and dependencies that detracts form the Programs the user wants to install
2. give companies a way to sell products and services - I guess not one store sells support packages as of yet - maybe a way for purism to innovate in the open source app store realm

[Michael_S]

It looks like Purism is trying to promote two small innovations in the open source software repository space:

1. Putting mobile applications and regular desktop GUI and CLI applications in the same store.

2. Adding some kind of quality rating to applications so users have a sense for the stability and maturity of something they're looking to download.

Free software is about freedom. I wish them good luck.

The batches look ridiculous and devoid of information.
Either the press release is badly written or the system needs work.

On the topic of app-stores.

I can see two reasons for them.

1. give users a cleaner view of the repository without the clutter of libs and dependencies that detracts form the Programs the user wants to install
2. give companies a way to sell products and services - I guess not one store sells support packages as of yet - maybe a way for purism to innovate in the open source app store realm

Ubuntu MATE, for example, installs a GUI program called "Software Boutique" by default and does not have "Software" or "Synaptic Package Manager" by default. If you use Software Boutique it only shows you a simple list of programs to install. You can still use apt from the terminal or use the Software Boutique to install Software or Synaptic Package Manager, and then use those to install libghc or whatever. But for casual users, most of the stuff they would care about are in Software Boutique.

I think that's a good model - you can get to the power user stuff, it's all available, but the default is friendlier to newbies.

[M@yeulC]

IMO one of the interesting parts here is that they hint at being cross-architecture. Do they intend to distribute LLVM IR?