Follow-on from https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387378 Since GNOME Tweak Tool is just totally inapplicable to Plasma, perhaps we ought to simply blacklist it and prevent it from showing up when the user is running Discover in Plasma. I can't think of a user who would actually intentionally want to install GNOME Tweak Tool on Plasma who would be using Discover instead of their package manager's command line interface.
Git commit 6cc89e068b9ca9aa0b9a511d6312a3e37fe79972 by Aleix Pol. Committed on 11/12/2017 at 15:51. Pushed by apol into branch 'Plasma/5.11'. Don't show packages tightly coupled to other desktops by default M +2 -1 libdiscover/backends/PackageKitBackend/AppPackageKitResource.cpp https://commits.kde.org/discover/6cc89e068b9ca9aa0b9a511d6312a3e37fe79972
Regarding Gnome Tweaks, there's not much I can do without hard-coding it. I suggest submitting patches to gnome tweaks, mate tweak, unity tweak tool, etc to set themselves as extensions to the shell they work with. From there we can filter them out. At the moment they are listed as normal applications.
Hiding apps marked with compulsory_for_desktop that have a non-matching desktop name is a good start and will filter out some things, but it won't work for these apps. GNOME Tweak Tool et al. are designed to be uninstallable apps that are *not* required for normal desktop use. The GNOME folks are never gonna go for marking GNOME Tweak Tool with compulsory_for_desktop (I know because I asked them last year to consider installing it by default and did not get anywhere).
Hi, I am the current GNOME Tweaks maintainer. It seems an abuse of compulsory_for_desktop to use it for the GNOME Tweaks app since it is not a core GNOME component. Although included by default in many distros (including RHEL), Tweaks is not in a default Ubuntu or Fedora install. We could add a NotShowIn=KDE; to the GNOME Tweaks .desktop. On the other hand, there are useful theme settings there for people using GTK apps. Please discuss this issue with GNOME as they have concerns with how to display generic apps (like "Calculator"). In general, we do want KDE apps to be available in the GNOME Software app and I think many GNOME apps could be useful in a Plasma desktop too.
Hi Jeremy, thanks for joining the conversation! This issue is triggered because by default, Discover displays apps in order of popularity, and apparently GNOME Tweaks is very popular! :) However I have to imagine that nearly all of that popularity comes from GNOME desktop users, not KDE Plasma users. While there is a very limited use case for Plasma users who use GNOME apps and want to change some of their behavior using GNOME Tweaks, KDE's System Settings is currently the place where we centralize GTK app settings, so GNOME Tweaks is somewhat superfluous for that use case. It just almost never makes sense to show to KD Plasma users--especially not as the second entry in a list of popular apps. Regarding the subject of showing GNOME apps in Discover and KDE apps in GNOME Software (which is excellent, by the way--congrats!), please join me in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387378.
Note that the GNOME Tweaks app is set to not show up in Plasma. See the OnlyShowIn= line: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-tweak-tool/tree/data/gnome-tweak-tool.desktop.in
@Nate do you think we should keep this issue open? We don't have metadata indicating us it's DE-specific and devels don't seem to consider it to be.
GNOME devs do seem to consider GNOME Tweaks to be DE-specific: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-tweak-tool/tree/data/gnome-tweak-tool.desktop.in#n13 OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;Pantheon; Does Discover not see the OnlyShowIn entry in the desktop file? If not, can we change that?
No, we can't read the desktop file.
Hmm, that's a shame. Looks like our options are down to: - Filter it out based on name? - Add something to the AppStream spec to indicate which desktop an app recommends or requires, then ask Jeremy Bicha to add that to Gnome Tweaks' appstream file? - Do nothing and accept that the most popular app on the browse page will be something inapplicable to KDE plasma users? What do you think? I kind of like option #2 since that would also help people of all sorts who want to filter out software not designed for their DE.
I don't think we should blacklist this application, or for that matter, any application in Discover or other software centers. You don't know what the users want to do with the application - maybe they have GNOME installed and witch between Plasma and GNOME? Maybe they use the tweak tool to customize the looks of GTK+ apps or other GTK+ properties? it shouldn't be a featured app, but if people look for it it should really show up. We also don't blacklist MIDI applications if the user doesn't have a musical keyboard attached. Discover should - in my opinion - reflect all the software that is available. This is also the reason why AppStream doesn't contain any means to distinguish by desktop environment - you either make an app visible in all software centers, or in none.
> it shouldn't be a featured app, but if people look for it it should really show up. I agree. But right now it's not "featured". It naturally shows up at the top of the browse list because the list is sorted by popularity, and evidently a lot of users (mostly GNOME users, I suspect) like GNOME Tweaks. If there was a way to demote it from the browse list when run on KDE Plasma, but make it still show up in searches--and perhaps lower down on the list--I'd be all for that. > maybe they have GNOME installed and witch between Plasma and GNOME? Maybe they use the tweak tool to customize the looks of GTK+ apps or other GTK+ properties? These are of course possible scenarios, but very niche use cases compared to the common case of the typical Discover user having only KDE Plasma installed and not knowing what GNOME Tweaks is, but wanting to check it out because it's apparently the most popular app in the entire Linux world. IMHO we should optimize for the common case, and Discover's primary target audience is normal people, not Linux experts.
Maybe best would be to go with 3 and assume we just need to create our own ODRS server.
That makes a lot of sense. That way, the reviews and ratings would only be relevant to other Discover users (nearly all of whom are on KDE Plasma). We could forget about these kinds of special cases and even give reviews more prominence, too (see Bug 380514).
The more I think about it, the more I really, really like your idea. Feel free to close this if and when we have a task or ticket tracking that work.
Maybe having a per-desktop weight to ratings applied locally makes more sense than rolling out a completely new ODRS instance - because that would mean that apps that are relevant on all desktops wouldn't share ratings anymore. Or, even better: Curate the front page of Discover by displaying a couple of predefined "featured" apps, like GNOME Software does. That would get rid of the randomness of whatever has the highest rating showing up on the front page.
Discover already does open to a page of curated apps. The issue is when you click the "Applications" sidebar item to browse, GNOME Tweaks is the first thing that shows up because that list is currently always sorted by popularity.
This is not the case anymore, so let's consider it not a problem. Now it's Battle of Wesnoth and emacs, which is fair enough.
Created attachment 115263 [details] Still on top in Neon dev unstable I still see it on top in Neon Dev Unstable.
Huh, now I see Geany too, in both Neon and Kubuntu (which I guess makes sense since they both use the same ODRS server). I guess it took a while to sync up or something.