Call for Testing: Bazaar as a Flathub store

Bluefin
64

You don’t? While yes you can install and uninstall flatpaks through warehouse, the main feature it provides is a frontend to advanced management for a flatpak.

The fact that you didn’t even know it existed kinda shows that it’s only needed in specific cases.

You can either use flatpak CLI to pin or rollback a flatpak to a previous reference. This is sometimes needed due to a regression. I would argue that this capability should not be exposed through the main store since it’s extremely easy to footgun here and disable updates.

Flatseal is another advanced tool. While it would be awesome for somethings to prompt automatically for access (looking at you steam + additional drive mounts), it’s significantly more complex than a single ask a question. For example, I embed one flatpak run time into another to allow them to talk to each other over a socket. I make host binaries available over bind mounts in /run. All of this is possible with flatseal (or more accurately through the flatpak CLI)

I want the flatpak ecosystem to grow and get better. I think having a fast, flatpak only store is part of that growth. And for 99% of things, the store is probably the only thing some needs to interact with.

65

You have exited people too much and they are mind exploding… :slight_smile:

And on the other hand, the speed kolunmi is working, by the end of weekend whole universe is going to be programmed, two times. :rocket:

66

Ha yes I’m absolutely excited :sweat_smile:
Good anecdotal comic btw @j0rge

Reading up on Warehouse its indeed for specific usecases, I can totally imagine Bazaar doesn’t need or should want to handle those.

67

Check out the snazzy version thing on the bottom left:

68

Love it… I was wondering why I couldn’t find that.

69

Awesome work, but the left-right scrolling on the categories needs serious rethinking. It totally works with a game controller, mobile phone, or tablet, but not on a mouse and keyboard layout. Is the endgame to become the default app store for all three uBlue flavors?

Also just wanted to say that the funding minded idea for the app devs is amazing and more funding will move Linux forward immensely. Like it or not people need to eat and money is a real incentive

70

This might be a silly question, but… how do I participate?

Typing in bazaar in terminal resulted in the message (the typo in the first line included):

The bazzar service is not running.
Invoke "bazaar service" to initialize the daemon.

When I then open the Bazaar app, it just shows as “Offline”

What have I missed? (I’m on the stable build)

71

I think you need to wait for the next stable build to get the working version of it. Or you can rebase to stable-daily

72

This is improving nicely (I’m on a stable-daily derived build).

I would use Gnome software to install something I already know exists. With this I’m encouraged to discover new things! :+1:

73

And here’s a nice clean way to solve the permissions thing for now, moving on to other things now …

74

Wow you move fast. Looks neat.

75

Just my two cents here:

  1. It doesn’t seem to be working for me, I’m affected by this bug
  2. Please don’t add user-level keybindings like this; you risk clobbering keybindings that users have intentionally set or are used in other applications. Where/how are they configured? For what it’s worth, Ctrl-Alt-\ is not set to anything in the gnome settings, and I definitely would have noticed if it had been set to something else because I use this keybinding all the time for indent-region in Emacs.
76

Yeah we’re dropping the key binding. EDIT: fix: unbind ctrl-alt-\ by castrojo · Pull Request #604 · ublue-os/packages · GitHub

This will go out in tonight’s weekly builds so everyone should be fresh across the board on Bluefin.

77

I have updated to Blufin 42 Stable to image 42.20250615.2.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUT
I see in Settings | Keyboard | Keyboard shortcuts | Custom Shortcuts | Search on Bazaar there is command: bazaar --search that I tried to execute from terminal and reports error:
"Unrecognized command “--search”
In terminal I have executed: bazaar --help and it looks like there is no “--search” switch. In Settings I have changed command to bazaar window that looks like launches the GUI. Interesting way of launching GUI, I expected to use “bazaar” without any switch or subcommand to launch a GUI. At least that is behaviour of most GUI apps.

But in Settings it looks like Ctrl+Alt+\ should launch bazaar command, but I am unable to type this kind of shortcut on my keyboard. I have to press right Alt key + Q to get \ key. Alternative way of getting \ on my keyboard is left Ctrl + left Alt + Q. I tried a lot… but executing Ctrl+Alt+\ is just impossible on my keyboard. Still pretty complicated shortcut anyway.

OTHER WAY TO LAUNCH BAZAAR
It should be simpler like Super+Spacebar, that interesting launches some kind of search field that behaves just like Super key and typing text, just it looks smaller window. I have not know about this shortcut… but interesting some duplication feature in Gnome, that I would not expect… Gnome = strip down everything to simplicity… This is another story I guess.

I changed shortcut key to key right bellow the Esc. The only key on my keyboard that is completely useless and I never ever use it, because there are just two foreign characters that are never used in my native language (normal press and Shift+key both useless). But it is very convenient to have this key as shortcut, because I can type it blindly very fast, just far left to get to Esc and one key down. Don’t know how useful is this key on other keyboards.

If we just drop shortcut… actually it is pretty simple to search for it. Press Super key and type ba and it appears (still with broken icon):

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and pressing Enter to launch.

For convenience probably it would be good to be placed in “logo” menu instead of “Software Center” but I suggest to have name “Install Software” or “App store” or something that is immediate clear what will happen. Or maybe add icon to dash itself like Ubuntu does.

MULTI-LAUNCH OF APP - BUG?

When pressing my new shortcut multiple times it launches Bazaar multiple times. I expected if Bazaar is already running just display it and not launch new instance of it.

HOW MANY ICONS IN ONE ROW

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In above image it looks like two second line icons could just fit inside first line. Why are there two lines? Look bellow it fits well:
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It looks to me some apps selection, but if I don’t want any of this, I would probably like to have More button, just like on Flathub to get more apps…

CUT OFF TEXT
Text on buttons are cut off, both app name and text bellow.

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But if looking to Flathub one app with longer text, everything fits well:

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Cut off text looks amateurish and cut off description is not really useful, because I am force to click on icon to see details.

WHY APP IS RECOMMENDED
Recommendation section is very nice. But I have not heard of any of those. What would be awesome is to get quick text why someone recommended app - what was the fascination about app.

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TOO LARGE GROUP
Office and productivity section are all kind of software that has little in common. Maybe there should be separate group e.g. Art where image editors, painting tools, 3D tools etc. for artistic people to find there tools.

NO HORIZONTAL SCROLLER
Bellow one app is not displayed:

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I have mouse with two scrollers, one is “middle” mouse button and this one works fine it scrolls up and down, but I also have thumb scroller that in many apps scrolls horizontally from left to right and I expect this to scroll on “Office & Productivity” section and it doesn’t.

SMALL AND LARGE GROUPS
Browsers section is too narrow and “Office & Productivity” is too wide. Maybe instead of “browsers” it should be “Internet connectivity” and have mail clients e.g. Thunderbird, IRC client

ORDER OF GROUPS
I would not put Browsers as first top section, because Firefox is already preinstalled, so users probably need some other app first.

ADDITIONAL SECTIONS
Maybe there is missing Chat section with chat apps.

LIBREOFFICE MISSING ICON
LibreOffice does not have icon?

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and there is on flathub:
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APP DETAILS
I marked it red. I don’t know if all this info is useful. I would just collaps alll this info and only display them if user clicks on them.

Version info (in blue section) is also not really useful. It would be nice if what is new in some version is displayed. But… if someone installs new app, probably news are also not really important.

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It looks to me that somehow intention was to fill the space.

REMOVE IRRELEVANT INFO AND ADD PRINT SCREENS IN FRONT

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ZOOM OUT ON IMAGE
When clicked on image it would be nice to full screen the image, so it can be better seen.

78

Eh this is the Searchlight extension and has been in bluefin for ages. Also those bazaar shortcuts were removed as they might override with user setted keycombos for other things.

79

I personally don’t think it is a good idea to fully emulate phone permission settings. I am only joining this thread now, so I might have missed some things. But I think Flathub already has a good permission model:

Developers can ask for whatever permission they want at app submission, they just have to justify it. And that means properly explain why it needs that permission, not just say, “We need the ability to execute any command because that’s a normal part of remote desktop app,” but actually explain it. Users are never asked anything, they’re just warned.

The good part of this is that developers can ship an optimized experience to user. And user doesn’t deal with alert fatigue as well - I personally just says “Always allow” a lot of the time because I can’t be bothered to try if it works fine on minimal permission first. The only thing I don’t like is how liberal Flathub is with saying an app is “insecure.” In my opinion, if it doesn’t demand more a browser, with proper scoped dir, then it should just say “Probably safe” but gives a highlight for apps that goes above and beyond the normal apps of these days about being trustable in terms of permissions.

To that end, I think the best thing Bazaar can do is to have permission editor inside the app, yes, and a way to access it directly from application launcher right click menu. In addition, an open database of overrides, similar to what is being done about hiding certain unoptimized apps on Bazaar, that can either inform the user or apply a one-click maintainer-approved setting changes that takes care of most common complaints (say, Bottles’ access for .exe outside of its default allowed directory).

I say “open database” IMO the protonfixes database system works well enough that Valve can selectively pull from ProtonGE/UMU’s database and vice-versa, while downstream user of UMU can benefit from it or block it as needed thanks to the protonfixes ID matching system. This would encourage people to contribute and selectively apply blacklist/overrides instead of rebuilding the list from scratch.

Ofc that’s just my opinion but personally, I think the current system works, we just need to inform the user IF there’s an easy way to fix common complaints.

80

Anyways, as far as my wishlist goes, all I hope that making Bazaar be a library-like package is considered - something like libghostty and what’s being done with Bottles. I don’t need it to be a thing now, but it should be considered, so that the UI and the backend could be separated eventually.

The fact of the matter is that if this goes fully GNOME-only, the best you can hope for is that Mint only rips the theming part, instead of not adopting it at all. I don’t think there’s any effort to make a ubiquitous Flathub GUI that make sense if it doesn’t also consider what Mint, Ubuntu (if that day ever comes), and SteamOS would do with it and if they even want it.

It has to be as plug-and-play as the flatpak cli it is building on top of, or they’ll just go back and use the flatpak cli, never even considering your desired vision for how the app should be designed.

81

Yesh we dropped the ctrl-alt-\ shortcut. Once it’s wired in to the desktop you’ll just super-search and it’ll populate the dash thing like gnome-software does today.

82

Anyways, as far as my wishlist goes, all I hope that making Bazaar be a library-like package is considered

This would not be, the library you’re looking for is flatpak, Bazaar is just a libadwaita frontend for that library.

83

I guess that’s fine if Flatpak/Flathub does eventually implement donation via flatpak CLI. Otherwise, I struggle to see how both the solving donations/payment aspect of Bazaar and the designing proper Flatpak/Flathub GUI aspect will actually propagate beyond Universal Blue.

I mean, on ublue-os, people will use it, true. Much like Ptyxis, we can just be blocked and replace GNOME Software and Discover, so that people will be forced to use the envisioned design of Bazaar. But I don’t see how it isn’t just a classic “there are now 50 competing standards” situation, especially since elementary already did put an emphasis on donation.

Honestly, I feel like I’ve gone up and down in my hype for Bazaar. Sometimes I feel like it’s just a small project made for fun (which is fine), and other times it has all these grand ambitions that I can get behind, but the commitment level feels really weird for either of them.

Idk I guess I’ll just wait and see since I usually just google what stuff I want to install from Flathub & chocolatey anyways. Well, I hope it has proper handling for Install button on Flathub, at least.