Now Bazaar has enough feature parity with gnome-software so we’ve gone ahead and made the switch in bluefin:latest. Most of you will get this update next weekend - in the meantime feel free to dive in and give feedback! bluefin:stable-daily will start to get this tomorrow.
Issues: Check these first as we’ve been logging people’s requests here: GitHub · Where software is built - note that the curated page with the dinosaurs and app tiles isn’t Bazaar, that’s our custom config, we’re still working on it. (The horizontal experience needs work still!)
There’s still some session integration work to happen over the next few days, notably the background service doesn’t start until you launch the app or you hit the super key. This means there’s a loading screen at first. We’re working to make that just be part of login, the end state will be instant launch.
I prefer to use with the Super-space shortcut - this is nice because if you’re in chat or on the web and you see an app you like it’s an easy quickfire way to try an app:
Yes there is. Bazzite will have it, and also it will be on Aurora soon(ish). Although at start we will propably leave Discover there too, but we are working on replacing the Discover search suggestions/results with Bazaar ones in Krunner.
Aurora will stay the same, but included with Bazaar
Also (not promised) but there maybe a QT frontend coming to Bazaar at later stage too. But that is dependent on a 3rd party dev so can’t make promises about it (yet).
This is very good. I meant to answer Jorge question “what SteamOS and Mint question” in the context of my comment but forgot about it:
So, in the various videos talking about Bazaar, there is a lot of hope put into it to be used to “slay the getting my applications dragon once and for all” along with addressing monetization issue (donations).
That’s a great aim, and it’s great if Bazaar can be part of the answer because we do need a real app ecosystem for Linux to go more mainstream. But, to do so, Bazaar’s effort can’t just stay in Bazaar. It’d just be elementaryOS appcenter 2.0 in that case.
No, there needs to be a way for Bazaar’s efforts to propagate beyond just ublue-os family. Being good enough Gnome is interested in promoting it a la many of their modern apps rebuild is a good step in the right direction, but Mint and SteamOS needs to be accounted for because 1.) They are still a huge portion of Linux Desktop and still growing with even people like Pewdiepie directing people there; 2.) They only care about their DE’s apps.
In other words, the good work of Bazaar could just be stuck in Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite a la appcenter being stuck in elementaryOS (and to a lesser degree PopOS). It doesn’t need to be a Qt version or a libbazaar like I mentioned. Just for the good ideas to, in some way, be portable enough to be adopted in other DE and other distro.
Anyways, that’s enough of that. I’ll probably check it out once it’s on Bazzite Ally Stable, but I rarely install new apps these days, outside of checking random stuff via Arch Distrobox. I hope the removal of Discover doesn’t disturb KDE’s Get New Stuff and updating those stuff, though, when that happens.
Bazaar has its “upstream” version that is pretty much open for all. I think there is already work ongoing to packaging it for NixOS and maybe others, but those are of course work by contributors.
So in the grand scheme of things, its available for anyone if they want.
Will the Software Center button from the top left menu button link to Bazaar now? And will it start pinned on the taskbar for new installs in place of the previous software store?
I don’t think I’ve personally ever seen such a nice app come together so quickly. As a non-developer, it has been impressive to watch. For some tech journalist, there is probably a story here to be told.
That’s why we picked bazaar because it’s not it’s own thing. It’s a Flathub store. All it needs to prove is that people want it. It doesn’t matter to us if everyone adopts Bazaar, that’s out of our control and not our decision to make. It solves the problem for us specifically.
Ultimately it’s about helping Flathub succeed, and it’s my opinion that eventually GNOME and KDE will just take charge of their experiences and run the apps out of Flathub. In this cloud native model the distribution is the base image, ultimately it’s purpose is to be invisible because we want the payload to shine, the desktop and the apps. This is why we say we’re “distroless”. Also SteamOS already chose Flathub anyway, of course we’re going to copy that pattern of success!
Bazaar is just our preferred way to Flathub, ultimately we’re just building a UI on top of flathub. We’re choosing this on purpose because it’s distribution agnostic, that’s part of our value, we provide a Flathub first experience.
It is unusual in UI to talk about transactions in meaning of install/uninstall. Usually non-technical abstraction words for UI is better to hide complexity to end user.
I have added several long installing apps and clicked on uninstall one of them. This “transactions” are qued which is great, but it would be fine I could pause some of them and let some others to install quicker, something like on Android phone.
In header there remains Installing/Removing even when finished. I expect to see Installed/Removed.
It looks like there is currently no translation system in place, which is probably fine for Universal Blue images for now, because we are moving fast… But as soon we start talking about Blufin is for first time Linux users or Bazzite to be adopted by larger multi million user distro this is just must have.
Hey, I would love to propose apps for the Curated page. Is that welcome? I didn’t just want to open a pull request out of the blue. I could though, if you’d like
Specifically I want to propose Main Menu (Install Main Menu on Linux | Flathub)
Can do what Pins does, but has a UI that explains what each field does. It feels less like editing a .desktop file and more like changing some settings, which is a lot more approachable imo.
