Lies Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’… …yet. The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady. Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app stores, not Monty Python or Eminem). Background I have previously lamented on the following subject as a stream of tweets.

To be clear, I’m not complaining that we don’t have these aforementioned applications on the Linux desktop. That’s not the point. The point is “we” still don’t have a robust way for developers to monetise their application development work.

Most desktop Linux users run Ubuntu. Followed by others you’ve likely heard of like Arch, Fedora, Manjaro, SUSE and friends. Most users of these desktop Linux distributions have no baked-in way to buy software.

Similarly developers have no built-in route to market their wares to Linux desktop users. Having a capability to easily charge users to access software is a compelling argument to develop and market applications.

For sure, I can (and do) throw money at a patreon, paypal, ko-fi or buy a developer some coffee, beer or something from their Amazon wishlist. But I can’t just click “Buy” and “Install” on an app in a store on my Linux laptop.

Maybe one day all the ducks will be in a row, and I’ll be able to buy applications published for Linux, directly on my desktop. Until then, I’ll just keep looking longingly at those macOS app developers, and hoping.

  • averyminya@beehaw.org
    2·
    9 months ago

    Oh definitely, the Steam Deck is a great example of this - the preinstalled package manager handles desktop side updates while Valve handles the Steam side updates. You could never use the package manager and know none the wiser, and likewise you could pretty much never boot into gaming mode and it’s still all handled for you via package manager. Love my Steam Deck. I’ve experienced basically the same as you, pretty much nothing I’ve thrown at it fails, unless I were to cheat and try VR or something.

    The only actual thing that made me sad was I planned on using it for portable Rocksmith but there are some pretty major issues with audio, even in a Windows install, but I was pretty much expecting that since the software already has issues. But that’s fine, it does stellar emulating switch games :)