cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13038090
https://fosstodon.org/@soller/112083947500126938
COSMIC Store is coming along quickly, though there is still a lot left to do. It loads nearly instantly, because it uses bitcode to cache appstream data in an optimized format. It uses very little memory compared to the Pop Shop. Searches can be performed live as they are done in parallel. Searching for “e” takes 5.5 ms on my desktop and returns 4601 results.
I just realized that I haven’t read any infos about the package manager that Cosmic is going to use. Is it going to be build on top of Ubuntu like Pop!OS and use apt? Are the apps going to be served by the package manager or as Flatpaks? If the later, it could be interesting to public them on the Flathub Beta remote when they reach that stage.
PackageKit isn’t a package manager in the same sense as what I meant. It’s more like a one level above “front end” to be able to manage different package managers with the same program. This means that “Software Stores” that use packagekit like Gnome Software or KDE Discover will work on most Linux system with whatever package manager is used in the backend. For example on a Fedora Workstation, packagekit makes it possible to install, update and manage both rpm installed through dnf, Flatpaks and if I wanted, Snaps, while on a Debian based system it would be able to manage your apt stuff, or on Arch packages installed through pacman for example. But from what I heard this also makes it a somewhat clunky and slow piece of software that has become kind of clunky and hard to maintain over the years, so its also an interesting question whether Cosmic is going to use it.
