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Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

I'll agree when PopShop doesn't take 800mb of ram idle in the background (it keeps the entire repo in memory instead of in a DB).

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Genuine question, are any of the package manager "app store" style front ends actually nice to use right now? From my perspective having used several different distributions and environments over the course of the last ~15 years, they've all been "just ok" at best, very obviously webviews with some native chrome glued on, and had issues with resource usage, glitchy UI/UX, lagginess, etc.

Is it a matter of these particular bits not receive adequate attention or something else? I'm not opposed to trying to pitch in and help improve them but before that's feasible the root problem needs to be understood.

Synaptic works great. Not super newbie friendly though.

I've been using Solus 4.4 for a few days. Best package install experience I've had - one tool to do it, no weirdness or scary messages about dependencies, and the hit rate on getting the software I'm looking for without issues has been very high. Top notch desktop distro.

I think a lot of it is because distros tend to play hot potato with the packaging and try to reduce their load by building off Debian or Arch, which makes the experience way less consistent as you end up with fragmentation surfaced to the user. Add in a bit of corporate open-source "embrace the user" and you get app store jank that the developers never use because they just open a terminal instead.

Is there any legitimate reason for this? I also find it generally unresponsive and it lags hard inbetween searches and clicks. I mean I always update from terminal but for how they’re trying to develop the desktop experience I don’t get why it takes up so many resources despite being sluggish

All the work is done in the UI thread. They did some work on that, not sure if merged.

I'd fix it myself but it's all in Vala and I don't have time to learn another language.

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