Suggestion for Collaboration and Contribution to the Official GNOME Software

[misterlego]

Hi @kolunmi

I've been following your work on your software app project (Bazaar) with interest. It's great to see development in this area, and your skills are clearly valuable.

I'm writing to humbly suggest that you consider directing your expertise and efforts towards contributing to the official GNOME Software project. As you may know, the default GNOME Software center is a crucial part of the user experience for many distributions. There's a recognized need for more development help, ongoing maintenance, bug fixes, and significant UI improvements. From what I understand, the project currently has a limited number of core contributors.

Your work on this project seems particularly relevant to the challenges the official software center faces. Contributing to the existing, widely-used application could have a broader impact and benefit a much larger number of GNOME users directly.

Perhaps there's an opportunity to collaborate with the current maintainers of GNOME Software or to integrate some of your innovative ideas and code into the official project. This could help accelerate the improvement of the default software center for everyone.

Thank you for considering this suggestion. I believe that pooling our collective talents can lead to a stronger and more robust software center for the GNOME desktop.

[Bammede]

I agree. It is better to use default Gnome App store integrated to Gnome well instead of custom one.

[misterlego]

Thank you for agreeing to this. @Bammede
Although it's sad that the creator of this app hasn't replied to my request yet.

[jfmongrain]

Let me try to answer that.

Getting a "stronger and more robust" software center requires to share a common definition of what that means, and it's clear to me that both projects have incompatible definitions, because Gnome-software and Bazaar have very different aims.

Bazaar is opinionated, in the sense that it wants to both promote Flathub and provide an easy way to make donations to the devs.

Bazaar is built from the ground up to fit the needs of image based (atomic/immutable) linux systems, where Flatpaks are the main way to install software. You can still use it on traditional distros, but supporting packagekit is out of scope, as one of the main goal is to promote Flatpaks (and Flathub) as the preferred way to get apps for Linux, as devs can maintain their packages themselves without having to produce a dozen versions built in different formats against different libraries. Just look at all the Fedora drama about maintaining their own Flatpak repos for legal/ideological reasons.

Bazaar is also designed to put forward donations to devs by linking to financial transactions (Kofi, Github sponsorships, etc.)

Gnome-software on the other end is meant to support (with packagekit) all sorts of traditional Linux package managers and formats. That's a challenge that is, in part, the cause of a lot of it's technical limitations, and it's clunky behavior, like refreshing the database every time you install something. That's the price you pay to be package agnostic.

Also, Gnome software will probably never integrate an easy way to make donations to the devs, as it aims at being distro neutral and some distros will just flat out refuse to have an integrated way to point to financial transactions.

So, two very different philosophies about what a "stronger" software center should do, and I don't see any way to make those two philosophies fit together.

It's a great thing that we have both, so you can choose the one that fits your preferred way to envision what the Linux desktop ecosystem should be and how to push that vision into the future.

Edit : I don't speak for the devs here, it's just what I gathered from what I've read on the Ublue Discord/Discourse, servers where Kolunmi and most of the other contributors to the project discussed those topics.

[Xarishark]

Literally could not say it better myself you hit every argument I was noting down while reading the OP.

IMHO Bazaar is pushing for a future that actually feeds linux app devs. Time costs money and people need to eat.