This is just the start and we hope that people test Bazaar and file bug reports or feature request.
In the future we will be moving Bazaar to the “normal” images (stable/latest) and it will feature a brand new artwork from the talented @Chandeleer. So expect more conepeople to make an entrance.
We are still evaluating the future, but the current plan is to replace Discover with Bazaar sometime in the fall.
Filing issues / feature request
If you notice something strange please file issues on the bazaar repo, so it gets tracked. Also possible feature requests.
From playing around with it on Bazzite, I’m excited for Bazaar on Aurora! No longer will I feel the need to check apps on Flathub to make sure they’re verified before I download them from Discover!
I’m sure the Aurora team is aware, but it seems like the inclusion of Bazaar to replace Discover is causing some waves amount the KDE users of Bazzite. Not saying we shouldn’t switch to Bazaar, but we may want to think about whether there is more we can do to let folks know this is coming or address some concerns.
It has me thinking about the forcing function idea that @j0rge mentioned in a video the other day. Are there efforts around Aurora to do some of the Qt-fying of GTK apps that all of uBlue tends to use?
I can’t say about others, but for me it’s the directions that I’m worried about. I came to appreciate Universal Blue because it feels like a sensible choice between Arch and Ubuntu to base everything I use on. It’s sorta like why I use KDE - I don’t enjoy wrangling Gnome to behave the way I wanted every updates and some things just required an absurd amount of effort that it makes more sense to use a software that support my usecase better.
In all honesty, I probably would enjoy SteamOS a lot more if it is compatible with a lot more devices. For a while, I thought Universal Blue could be something stable yet up-to-date that I could base everything on top of (a friend on Discord is similarly looking into Universal Blue for a similar usecase, so I don’t think it’s just me).
But if pushing a beta software and quickly deprecating (if not outright removing) upstream choices that has worked fine, fine enough for the larger upstream to accept it for their larger userbase, then it’s clear that the aspect about Universal Blue’s agenda of “dragging users into the future kicking and screaming” (as has been described once in one of Jorge’s videos IIRC) and pushing containers technology into desktop space should be emphasized over Universal Blue’s part about not being a distro and long-term sustainable installations. Also that there IS a BDFL that will decides what users should have.
It kinda reminds me about how people would be more accepting if you tell them upfront as to what to expect and that there WILL be rough times instead of just emphasizing the good parts.
I take the news that Aurora will also be shipping Bazaar and eventually remove Discover as a “signal” that more of these are coming - I may be more of a Bazzite user (though I used to run Aurora as well) but it’s plenty clear this is an organization-wide policy. If anyone’s disagree, that’s fair, but in the absence of clear communication, I think it’s fair for me to make assumptions as well.
Honestly I think we don’t really have anyone on the team very well versed in QT. As much it would be nice to build QT version of Bazaar, we are kind of swamped. Someone on mastodon mentioned about trying to work on it, but can’t hold my breath about it coming. If it comes, we are happy to swap to a QT version of it.
But unless someone with knowledge about QT and building UIs with it…not at the moment.
As much it would be nice to build QT version of Bazaar
As a true KDE fan I think there should be another question asked here first and that is : why? You say there few to none Qt people in the team, yet a perfectly good program like Discover has to be replaced and the replacement has to be changed into a Qt version. Discover can be used as-is, no need to do anything.
Do I say this right, is this what is happening?
One other thing is that it seems to me you don’t realize why Aurora users chose Aurora instead of Bluefin: it is because they love a KDE distro. Don’t take that away from them. Please. Let us have our KDE distro, let people who love Gnome have their Gnome distro, keep them apart and don’t mix them up.
Thank you.
I understand your feelings. I dislike the inconsistencies in the look of GTK apps in KDE. But that’s on GNOME’s team, who doesn’t seem to play nice with others.
Personally, I threw the towel. I’ve accepted that I can’t have Qt-ified apps of everything. GNOME is the most popular desktop environment, and I feel there are more apps being developed for it.
I agree that we should select the best apps, no matter the GUI toolkit. For example, I like Ptyxis (Terminal) a lot better than Konsole. Flatseal is better than the Plasma component. We don’t even have a Qt-ified browser!
As for Discover, it has issues. It’s slow, because it has to work with many different package managers. There are other issues that Jorge mentioned in the thread about Bazaar.
Since adding apps in Atomic desktops is done with flatpak, it’s logical to have a flatpak-only app store.
Hi there, I’d like to thank the Aurora and Bazzite KDE teams for creating what I’ve found to be by far the best Linux desktop experiences out there. With that being said, I instantly created a Discourse account for the first time to primarily keep up with future updates and news. Although, the other reason was to comment on this specifically-
I completely understand that all the Universal Blue images are focused on pushing forward container tech and a Flatpak/Flathub only appstore which is why Ptyxis replaced Konsole and why Bazaar is now replacing Discover (Along with other KDE/Qt apps in favor of GTK).
I’m totally fine with these decisions to replace apps for the most part, especially in the cases where there are KDE apps that don’t work as well. It’s the complete removal of these apps that I am worried about. The exact reason why I moved from Bazzite KDE to Aurora was that Bazaar completely replaced Discover, which was removed entirely.
Though I really dig Bazaar and I think it’s awesome that we finally have a really well-designed Flatpak-only store (Kudos to kolunmi)- I’d like nothing more than to keep using KDE apps like Konsole and Discover, even if Ptyxis and Bazaar are set as the default in Universal Blue images.
I was thrilled to find that Konsole and other KDE/Qt apps were still in Aurora- despite Ptyxis being the default- and I’d love if that could be the case for Bazaar and Discover as well. The KRunner integration with Bazaar sounds great and I can’t wait til Bazaar is on Flathub since that’ll bring even more attention towards it and Universal Blue.
Like I’ve mentioned earlier, I really can’t praise the teams and Universal Blue enough for all their work. I’m still relatively new to Linux and the experience has been nothing less than amazing.
I really hope this is taken into consideration. Thanks!
Edit- I’d like to also mention that Discover is Not on Flathub, unlike Konsole… leaving users who want to reinstall Discover needing to layer, (or use distrobox? Not sure) which isn’t great.
Atleast for the start we will be propably handling Bazaar same way we did with Ptyxis/Konsole. So Bazaar will be the default (search results etc come from it) and Discover will be “hidden” but kept in the image.
If nobody makes a QT version, then there will be no QT version.
If you are such a huge fan on plain KDE, then use kinoite-main its the pure Kinoite KDE image with the added codecs and stuff. Or you can do custom image with the image template and base it to kinoite-main. It takes like 5 minutes to setup and after that its automated to update the image once a day.
We don’t understand this “taking away KDE”. Kde is still there with extra sauce.
Atleast for the start we will be propably handling Bazaar same way we did with Ptyxis/Konsole. So Bazaar will be the default (search results etc come from it) and Discover will be “hidden” but kept in the image.
As another maintainer, I will chime in and say that my personal opinion is similar to what @inffy said here. I would like us to keep Discover on the image but hide it in a way that is easy for users to re-enable it in a simple way. This is based on my observations from the Konsole changes: there are some users that just prefer Konsole/Discover and leaving it on the image does not introduce any additional maintainence burden on our part (since they are already well tested in Kinoite).
Well, as you can see here, @inffy said: at the start. Earlier he also said this, in a different thread, but he also said Discover will disappear after some time and it will only be Bazaar.
I know I keep rambling about this but I don’t want to have to find a different distro since Aurora is a great one, it is stable, it has built-in Nvidia drivers, it has automatic updates, in fact it has it all. As said before, I love KDE for around 15 years now and I don’t like it when parts of it are taken away from it because then it is no longer a KDE distro. Plus, I still don’t understand why this is done. Why remove great working parts of a DE and replace it with parts of another? Can somebody explain this please?
@inffy I have been looking at your suggestion about Kinoite-main but that will be a bridge too far for me, I have no clue what to do with the github page Kinoite-main I am a computer user, not a developer, nor a software-engineer, or which ever names/titles there are.
Is this the place to find the replacement for Aurora or am I searching in a wrong place? Thanks.
Propably bad choice of words on my part (i am not native english speaker). But we haven’t actually made any decision about what in the future we do. But we have decided that Discover will stay in the image with Bazaar.
Think you should look into the image-template if you are interested doing your own. It is really, really easy.
Thank you. I will have a look when I am home again after the holidays. I now don’t have a well enough internet connection to be able to download a few GB’s.
That was probably me. BTW, I am working on learning Qt & QML, but it’s been a bit slow because of personal life issues getting in my way.
I do plan on sharing what I have once I have an alpha of the front end working. I do currently want to make essentially a Qt (and preferably Kirigami) version of Bazaar (obviously under a different name for several reasons) in terms of layout, but this may change depending on a few factors:
Bazaar’s license: Is it GPLv3 only or GPLv3 or later? If it’s the latter, this will greatly shorten the work I’ll have to do, should greatly decrease duplication of code, and should help make the code better and more testable. If it’s the former, unless the license is changed to the latter, I won’t be able to use Bazaar’s code, meaning I’ll have to rewrite everything because what I wrote of my project is unfortunately GPLv3 or later and I do not wish to change that in case I no longer am able to work on the project.
Again, I do plan for this app to be similar in layout (at least at first) to Bazaar, just with Qt instead of GTK.
Depending on how much time I have, I could also make a Synaptic-like or Octopi-like layout as a fork of this app, like Warehouse. (Unfortunately, I cannot use any code from Warehouse for my apps again because of the license.)
The working name for this Qt version of Bazaar is called App Mall. I currently do not have a public repo yet, but again, I will post one once I get a prototype or alpha ready.
Sorry for the long tangent, but I did want to clear a few things up.
Based on my experience using Bazaar in Bazzite, it works well enough, I guess. I can’t delete program data after uninstalling a Flatpak like I could in Discover; have to use Warehouse for that. Bazaar also does not show my update notifications in Plasma’s notification bar like Discover did. I have to open Bazaar to see if I have any pending updates (yes, I am aware that Aurora/Bazzite updates in the background). Also, speaking of Warehouse, if you uninstall a Flatpak via Warehouse and go into Bazaar, Bazaar thinks it’s still installed and won’t let you install/uninstall it.
I’m not a fan of GNOME, and I would prefer to have nothing to do with it. However, I like Bazzite and Aurora; so I’m just going to trust that the teams behind them are not replacing KDE/Qt software with GNOME/GTK software without good reason.
