The typical Discover user is somebody who's not going to understand or think they should have to understand distro package release schedules to know when they get a new version of the apps they use. They instead say, "Hey, I heard about a new version of LibreOffice/Blender/GIMP/Endless Sky/whatever; why does Discover only show me this old version that was released a year ago?"

Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage solve this problem by decoupling app release schedules from distro package lifecycle--but only if users are using the Flatpak/Snap/AppImage versions of the apps!

To facilitate this, I suggest that we implement a priority system for determining which version of an app is displayed by default in Discover when a user browses or searches for packages. Other versions should be available but hidden by default, and the default ordering of which version is presented by default should be user-changeable in Discover's settings. Here's my suggestion for the default ordering:

1. Flatpacks from Flathub (see also https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387718)
2. Snaps
3. Distro packages

Reasons:
1. Flatpak is the most distro-agnostic approach and so far has the most complete solution and distribution channel
2. Snap is also good, but less distro-neutral so far and not as popular or well-developed
3. Finally, fall back to the distro package repo if the package isn't available in either of the two above options
(obviously Ubuntu-based distros will probably reverse 1 and 2, and that's fine)


The net effect of this will be that over time, more and more of a user's Discover-installed software will be the Flatpak or Snap versions, allowing them to get new versions on app vendors' schedules, which is what most users want. For the advanced users who happen to want to use Discover, they can always change the priority and use distro packages instead, if they want.