I noticed this on Plasma 5.21's Discover, that there is no Retry button when it fails to load applications. In my experience, when this is run into, it often just takes a refresh to get it to load successfully, which is why I think there should be a Retry button.
We should just make this more reliable, but until then, you're probably right. We can add the button right into the PlacholderMessage.
Do you have any idea why it fails at all? Maybe you can check the output and see if there's any errors out there? Do you if it's the application list failing or actually listing the files? Which is your preferred applications backend in the settings? I've personally never seen this issue.
Well, I tried to reproduce this by simply disabling my internet connection, and attempting to start discover. Discover then proceeded to show a bunch of Transaction error: "cannot update repo 'fedora': Cannot prepare internal mirrorlist: Curl error (6): Couldn't resolve host name for... errors in the toast notification thing, and then tell me that everything is up-to-date. My thinking was that if this reproduced the "Unable to load applications" message, like it probably should, I could demonstrate that I would have to restart the entire application to get it working again after my internet connection is restored.
One way I managed to reproduce that "Unable to load applications" message is by running discover with only fwupd-backend, like this: plasma-discover --backends fwupd-backend That is despite my internet connection being active. There is also this message in the terminal: org.kde.plasma.libdiscover: Couldn't find a category for "fwupd-backend" I'm honestly not sure what's going on here. fwupd.service is active and running, but this still happens.
That's sort of a separate bug. When only using the fwupd backend, there are no application backends so.... yeah, you won't see a list of apps. :) The placeholder message should detect this condition and say something more appropriate though. Can you file a separate bug report about that?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #5) > That's sort of a separate bug. When only using the fwupd backend, there are > no application backends so.... yeah, you won't see a list of apps. :) The > placeholder message should detect this condition and say something more > appropriate though. > > Can you file a separate bug report about that? Done here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436932