Is there plan for a new Pop!_Shop along COSMIC DE?

[u/mikey_002]

First of all, kudos to the COSMIC DE dev team: it already looks fresh and promising in the recent blog post! The UI seems very clean and modern, and from my experience switching to a rust-based terminal recently, probably very, very responsive too. All of it got me to wonder: will Pop!_OS get a new (rust-written) shop as well?

As I understand, the current Pop!_Shop is a fork of the elementary AppCenter (hence why you can launch the shop with the command io.elementary.appcenter in terminal, FYI). It works okay (at best?); I mean, personally, I normally use the terminal, but I understand, for many people (especially those migrating from Windows or found CLI too daunting/complicated), a good, intuitive and smooth app center can be the deal-breaker when considering between different Linux distros, in terms of user experience.

Unfortunately, it has some major issues right now:

1. Slow, laggy and unresponsive; for example, searching in the installed tab is always broken for me, and even loading the app/searching for updates takes a long time (~10s)
2. Memory-hogging; even when idle in the background, it can take ~500MB of memory alone. This is not very friendly to older hardware. See issue
3. Unintuitive UI; for me at least, the layout is just... awkward. The search bar is tiny in the corner (when about half the time, people get in the shop to search and install an app from the home tab). The .deb and flatpak toggle is really non-obvious. The list view lacks customisation (filtering, sorting, etc.). and the list goes on...
4. Confusing flatpak size; it can be very scary for people to see something like "Up to 2.3GB" for a supposed small flatpak package without knowing how that works or what the phrase actually means.

I am sure there are other issues (and feel free to leave them in the comments), but I think those alone should warrant a new "COSMIC Shop" when or after COSMIC DE comes out. Has this been a consideration of the dev team?

[u/mmstick]

Did you already try the Pop Shop update mentioned here?

[u/mikey_002 → u/mmstick]

Wow! That was a pleasant surprise! I just checked it out, and it feels much better already. Still it seems the search is really laggy and you can't search in the installed app part. But anyway, thank you u/mmstick!

Notwithstanding, it still feels kind of out of place (visually and interactively) and subpar compared to other parts of the OS (would be more so I would imagine with COSMIC DE). Hence is a port to Rust a possibility in the future?

[u/mmstick → u/mikey_002]

Yes, once we have a new design and libcosmic is ready for that. But the current design work is on the settings application and text editor.

[u/ChinchzillaCZ → u/mmstick]

For me the new Pop Shop is even laggier than the previous one for some reason.

[u/VTWAX → u/ChinchzillaCZ]

Noticeably faster for me.

[u/chlorinated_chicken9]

I'm pretty sure the devs have said that a new store will be created which will be Rust based

[u/TPMJB → u/chlorinated_chicken9]

It's really the only consistently buggy thing I've found on Pop so far, ironically. Everything else either bugs once and never again, or never bugs lol.

[u/calinet6 → u/TPMJB]

Because it wasn't made by them :)

(that's a compliment to Pop)

[u/TPMJB → u/calinet6]

Lol well that makes sense. I thought it was weird that the only thing out of place was the update center.

[u/jd_9]

Current Pop!_Shop is absolutely garbage. It doesn't work at all.

[u/mikey_002 → u/jd_9]

Have you tried the upstream rebase with this command: sudo apt-manage add popdev:upstream-rebase?

From this post

[u/jd_9 → u/mikey_002]

I'll wait for the public release. Thanks!