SUMMARY If I click a link in apps.kde.org to install an app, I imagine that it'd work more or less universally - meaning: there should be an official flatpak or snap, or something that would let me install apps from apps.kde.org, like it works in othe app stores or in ubuntu/gnome. Otherwise, the button looks misleading - it has an app install icon, but it's not offering any app there, just passing a search term to discover for something that might not even exist. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Go to https://apps.kde.org/ksysguard/ 2. Click the big button that says "Install on linux". OBSERVED RESULT Should offer me to install ksysguard from a flatpak or snap or somewhere, like it does it ubuntu or android or any other software center. Official KDE apps should be published as flatpaks as part of some CI pipeline I imagine. EXPECTED RESULT If ksysguard is not offered by my distribution's package manager, it won't find it. It's not even on flathub BTW. Yet the official KDE software still tells me that that's the button to install it. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 12 KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103.0 Qt Version: 5.15.8 Kernel Version: 6.1.0-6-amd64 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 20 × 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-12700H Memory: 62.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® Graphics Manufacturer: SLIMBOOK Product Name: Executive ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
When you click that link, it opens Discover, which shows you all the different options for installing the app that your computer currently has available. If the app is available as a Flatpak, then Flatpak will be listed as an option in the Sources menu. > Yet the official KDE software There may be a misconception here; apps.kde.org is just a web page listing KDE apps that exist. As a dumb website, it can't know what apps you have the ability to install based on installed distro repos, packaging formats, Flatpak vs snap, etc. All the website can do is show you what apps are available and provide links to show the app in Discover, if it's available on your system. So I'm not sure what exactly you expect to happen that's different from what's already happening. Can you clarify the UX you would prefer? Are you asking for the website itself to show a popup showing you the different sources or something?
apps.kde.org looks for KDE apps on Flathub and Snapcraft before building, so it actually "knows" whether an app is available on the two platforms, and will show badges if that's the case, like this https://pasteboard.co/8e3xy9Vj2oLk.jpg (screenshot of apps.kde.org/gcompris). If such badges are not shown, the app is (very likely) not available there. What the website doesn't know is which platforms your system supports (it only can guess which OS), and so the "Install on Linux" badge just means to open any AppStream application store installed on your system, which knows that better, to look for the app.
I'm not sure what would be the ideal solution, but the current situation is: it says "Install on Linux", yet it might or might not install depending on your system, which is not the impression one gets from the button, the moreso if it's the icon of an app installer that my system has. The hinter about "You can also use your distribution's package manager" is also not accurate, as the package manager might or might not have it either. It also doesn't give any pointers as to where to go if the above doesn't work, and being a site under "kde.org" gives the impression of being the "official" installation source, as it would be for e.g. "binary-factory.kde.org" which pages like kate's or konsole's point towards. Perhaps it'd be better to rename the icon "Install on Linux" to "Search in Discover", since that's what it's actually doing, and the sub-text to rename as "You might also find it in your distribution's package manager". I was BTW thinking that all KDE apps had some form of CI pipeline generating binaries, but turns out it isn't the case, so perhaps a link to the auto-generated github repository or to the inventory page where the current source code is located would also help.
Installing apps generally works differently in Linux compared to on Windows and macOS where it's more common to download binaries from a website. This can take some getting used to, but we can't assume all our users are unfamiliar with this concept, since you generally only need to get used to it once and then it's done. If we're looking for maximum precision, changing "Install on Linux" to "Search in Discover" would still not do it since strictly speaking Discover isn't required; the button simply opens an appstream:// URL and any app that handles those URLs can launch, not just Discover. Also, the user might not have Discover installed. We would have to invent a very long and cumbersome piece of text to handle all of these situations if we want to achieve maximum precision to explain what will happen when you click the button. But even if we did, we would be undoing the important design goal of having a big obvious "Click here to install" button on the web page. In the past we didn't have this and we got a lot of questions about how to actually install these apps, and criticisms for omitting such a button. Adding the button fixed that. Yes, we now miss the edge case where your distro hasn't packaged the KDE app you click the button for, but this is IMO an acceptable trade-off in the service of making the UX better for people using distros with adequately large software repos, or with Flathub or Snap enabled by default. Discover itself even handles this case by showing you a screen that explains that the app isn't available in your distro's repos and you should go bug your distro to make it available. I don't think there's anything we can change here without regressing something significant, sorry.