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.

  • palordrolap@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Linux Mint has Software Manager, that is pretty close to an app store.
    It’s installed by default. Some other distros might have something similar.

    (Versions since that article was written can have an “ad” picture at the top for a recommended package, which, somewhat bizarrely, does make it look even more friendly than the interface shown.)

    True, it’s not a Linux-wide common interface, but then the gap between two distros can be as wide as between commercial operating systems, and it would be foolish to expect their app stores to have a common interface.