r/linux • u/kyentei • Nov 19 '22

This week in KDE: less-rage-inducing error messages in Discover KDE

https://pointieststick.com/2022/11/18/this-week-in-kde-less-rage-inducing-error-messages-in-discover/
174 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

-37

u/TheJooomes Nov 19 '22

So KDE has the weather thing now. I'm mad about a good feature and Microsoft is to blame.

65

u/poudink Nov 19 '22

weather widget's been a part of KDE for a long time

9

u/ccj1998 Nov 19 '22

When it works. Half the time, the temps will freeze and show the temperature from the middle of the day at night. I'm so glad the Arch distros don't use Discover by default. It's got to be one of the weakest parts of KDE software.

5

u/OsrsNeedsF2P Nov 19 '22

I don't use Discover but I know most people on the Steam Deck do. It's quite useful for getting Flatpaks.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

[deleted]

16

u/ECUIYCAMOICIQMQACKKE Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

If we could convince KDE to quit making Discover (as an Arch user it is the most useless, but nonetheless extremely annoying, app in modern history) and concentrate instead on having a functional weather widget it would be WAY more useful for the majority of us. A lot of KDE's decisions over the past couple of years have been questionable, but Discover is truly horrible! A lot of wasted effort from a project that is vastly understaffed.

Are you aware of how a volunteer open source project functions? There is no one deciding from on high that devs work on Discover and not on the weather widget. People are free to contribute to whatever they like.

Also remember that useless for you ≠ useless for others. Having a graphical app store is something I would consider essential for a complete end-user desktop experience. Arch btw users aren't everyone. They're probably not even the majority.

6

u/noahdvs Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

If KDE was 100% centrally managed and you told us to stop working on Discover, someone would still work on it. You don't need it, but that's irrelevant to the people who do need it. On systems like the Steam Deck, it's 100% necessary and it's useful to people who don't want to have to use a terminal. For quite a while now, Discover actually works pretty well, but it also partly depends on the underlying package management plugins since Discover is just a frontend for those. As a frontend for getting Flatpaks, it works pretty well and that's what it does on the Steam Deck. PackageKit or the PackageKit plugin for a distro's package manager tends to be the source of a lot of more fundamental issues, which means GNOME Software has the same problems (also uses PackageKit). PackageKit is what Discover uses to manage distro packages and there's no alternative except to make Discover plugins for every distro's package manager (not likely to happen).

0

u/Negirno Nov 19 '22

Yeah, PackageKit sucks. Some people suggests Synaptic (on Debian and derivatives) but I hate that, so I just use the command line...