- What is the philosophy behind the curated app store? Cherry-picking as I understand we do now seems very "Apple". Of course, having a software center full of actively maintained projects is great, but I see a lot of value in having either a separate app, or a separate tab where "unverified apps" alongside 3rd party proprietary apps exist. Less work for the dev team, and more options for the end-user.
There is no way to have unverified apps added and have it be less work. Someone still has to package it and test you can not just not test otherwise a large percentage of things on first try would be broken. and Solus is all about that curated experience.
The third party section of the software center has apps that are not actually in the repository but are repackaged from packages provided upstream on your system in real time. The apps in this section have to work this way due to their license prohibiting third party distribution.
The rewrite of the software center is intended to have integration with universal packaging such as snap packages so there is 1 place to go to. Any app that is not in our repository and provided by a snap / flatpak will be made clear to the user so they could avoid them if they wish to.
- Will there be something similar to the PPA system of APT down the line? A "community" repo that is barely managed could be a solution to the previous question.
No PPAs exist because Ubuntu is not a rolling release distribution. They will not update packages in their repo for the term of the LTS if they have ABI changes. PPAs work around this and get users up to date applications for things they care about. As a rolling release Solus does not need this, if there is a new update and there is no known reason to hold it back, just update it.
If you mean a User Repository like the AUR on Arch, no Solus has absolutely no interest in this. We have experienced plenty of people try maintain their own repo it just ends up with more breakages. If this is what you want, use arch.
- Will all of the code repositories live in one place? I was very confused trying to figure out where to post a bug report when I went looking. There are repos that exist under "solus-project" and "buddies of Bungie" on Github plus the main dev tracker. The people who only want to use their OS and not tweak/fix it, are less likely to report bugs or feedback if it's an ordeal to find the button.
The Solus-Project github is deprecated do not use it for anything. When Ikey left he some how lost access to several of his accounts this was one of them and we can not get it back. Budgie HAD remained there as Josh had access to that repo. With Josh leaving Budgie is no longer in house so it will remain separate at https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop
We have had our replacement github org https://github.com/getsolus since Ikey left.
- Why do we use IRC over another platform like discord or slack? I know they're proprietary, but it's convenient for people, and I expect a lot more people would interact if they didn't have to figure out IRC. I polled about six of my friends that are in their early to mid-'20s and only one of them even knew what IRC is.
IRC is open source, so we could deploy our own server if we wanted to. Alternatives have come and gone, IRC has proved resilient surviving them all.
Large Discords are a nightmare to moderate. On IRC if there is someone that keeps evading bans we can reach out to the IRC network admins and quickly they take over and ban them from the network, repeatedly if necessary. Discord you are pretty much on your own. I know communities smaller than ours that struggle to moderate and have stupid things like requiring interactions with posts in a certain way before new users are allowed access to the majority of the channels. This happens because of a lack of good tools available to communities.
Discord currently also does incredibly dumb things like constantly having forced updates which means it will stop working on a users system until Solus update the package and cherry-pick the update to stable. Having users not be able to ask for help because of this would be horrible. Theoretically we can stop this by making a config change to the discord package but we cannot due to the license we agree to in order to distribute it ourselves.
If people do not want to use IRC they do not have to. They can use our sub reddit or these forums. We will continue to evaluate new options and re-evaluate existing ones from time to time but I would not expect this to change any time soon. IRC would not be dropped and you do not add more options and decrease work load.
- What's the thought process on other packaging solutions like Flatpak or Snap? I personally try to stay with one solution for all my applications but that's not always possible. The lack of a unified and functional GUI for programs is a big reason why people steer clear of Linux or stick to ubuntu. "People" refers to the users who have no desire to use the command line, which is arguably the same demographic that makes Ubuntu so popular.
Universal packaging formats should be used for things we do not or will not have in our repository. We do not have any universal packages we maintain ourselves. They are there for people who want to use them. Using the command line need not be a requirement for installing snaps/flatpaks as a hinted at in the answer to the first question.
- Why go through the trouble of curating an app store, if a more mature 3rd party app store exists and is in direct competition? That seems like it'll end up like Microsoft's App Store in windows, which is largely unused.
Not sure if you mean other software centers? If so it would need to work with our package manager which means there is a lot of work to do. It would have to be a hard fork of someone elses design that we will inevitably have disagreements with regarding the decisions they have made and rewrite it all anyway. So it solves nothing and no there is no benefit in us using someone elses package manager either, we would not remain compatible.
If you mean why not use another distributions repository then that is even worse. We are not based on another distribution so we are not compatible and if we were there is no point in existing as you are tied to your parent distributions decisions like it or not.
