It is possible for Discover to end up in a situation where it has no app backends present, or no valid repos for any app backends. (for example if the distro ships with only the Flatpak backend, but neglects to add any flatpak repos). In such a circumstance discover announces that no apps were found and advocates checking the network connection, which is a red herring in this case. It should be intelligent enough to distinguish between "I can't find apps because I can't connect to the internet" and "I can't find apps because there are no valid app repos configured"
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/215
Git commit f935e48de1707348bd9af7ede0c4f26b462805fd by Aleix Pol. Committed on 02/12/2021 at 16:36. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. Improve error messages when the default source is not behaving Addresses the weird error message we always get when the default backend isn't working as expected. Allows the backend to explain why instead of wildly guessing from the frontend. M +2 -1 discover/DiscoverDeclarativePlugin.cpp M +2 -0 discover/FeaturedModel.cpp M +6 -0 discover/FeaturedModel.h M +18 -7 discover/qml/BrowsingPage.qml A +20 -0 discover/qml/ConvertDiscoverAction.qml [License: LGPL(v2.0+)] M +1 -7 discover/qml/SourcesPage.qml M +1 -0 discover/resources.qrc M +13 -0 libdiscover/backends/FlatpakBackend/FlatpakBackend.cpp M +2 -0 libdiscover/backends/FlatpakBackend/FlatpakBackend.h M +9 -0 libdiscover/backends/PackageKitBackend/PackageKitBackend.cpp M +2 -0 libdiscover/backends/PackageKitBackend/PackageKitBackend.h M +6 -0 libdiscover/resources/AbstractResourcesBackend.cpp M +25 -0 libdiscover/resources/AbstractResourcesBackend.h https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/commit/f935e48de1707348bd9af7ede0c4f26b462805fd