Yet another Discover thread

[chimak111]

Eleven months after KDE talks about polishing Discover, it's still unusable has some of the same old, same old but there's also this comment from mgraesslin:

Discover works great. I'm using it as a user and haven't contributed a single line of code. So what I say is completely from user perspective and not from dev perspective.

I use discover every day to update my packages on my Neon dev unstable system and that are 200 to 500 packages each day. And it just works. It's much easier and faster to do than from a terminal.

What I love most about discover is the great flatpak integration and the possibility to decide for each package whether I want to install it from system packages or from flatpak. And also those packages are just updated when there is a package.

I think flatpak has really improved and I find it sad that the devs get so much negative feedback.

On the other hand I also have a Debian system and I would never never try to use Discover there. The distribution just doesn't support it. And that's the thing you should complain about. Don't complain about discover, complain about the distros which don't configure it properly and don't have the packages in a discover compatible way. There is absolutely no point in providing discover if the package system doesn't support it. In such a case it would be better to only offer it to interact with GHNS and flatpak, but not for distro packages.

Please go and tell your distribution if discover sucks on their system. Give it a try on neon and compare. And then tell your distro: "look there, I saw it working. Get your job done!"

I took the liberty to quote the above content completely as it stands at the moment. I hope that doesn't break the forum's rules.

[Snowhog]

Nope. No 'rules' broken.

[Qqmike]

In 18.04, on desktop and laptop, I have been using Discover to get updates with no problems this past couple weeks. The only possible glitch I'm still punchy about is this: After it finishes updating, it checks for updates, and sometimes (maybe 10%-20% of the time) it doesn't ever give any conclusion (such as No Updates). (When that does happen, I then run the apt commands to clear things up, then close out Discover.)

[claydoh]

Been using discover as my usual update method for a long time now i Neon, no issues in a while. Only nitpick is a lack of progress indication. Visual cues that something is happening when it is checking for updates.

Kubuntu 18.04 got stuck with a 'bad' version for too long, unfortunately.

[woodsmoke]

Been using discover as my usual update method for a long time now i Neon, no issues in a while. Only nitpick is a lack of progress indication. Visual cues that something is happening when it is checking for updates.

Kubuntu 18.04 got stuck with a 'bad' version for too long, unfortunately.

i agree however for Neon Dev edition I see "blue bars", not very long ones, but with some width, which progress as the item is being updated.

And I always did that also up until about maybe a few months ago and now do not.

And yes, I many times "reclick" the update to see if there are new updates because sometimes one package update then requires another package update, this is usually with games because the system is running through the large screen t.v. and I play a modicum of games on it.

nice thread!

woodlikesthethreadsmoke

[oldgeek]

My only problem with Discover is that it SEEMS slow, although to be honest I've never timed it against the use of the terminal. I also think the progress bars on the individual programs are weird, since the coloring goes backward after a certain point (about 75%) and when the process is finished, they stand at 50% colored. Weird. The upgrade process bar charts don't do that, just the ones for the individual programs. I have no problem other than that with the program, which I use off and on with Kubuntu and Neon (on a vm).

[kenj70]

OK, here's my experience:

Before I upgraded to Neon 18.04, Discover, for several months always reported 1 package available for update. After update to 18.04 I always have 3 packages available that never update. This is a minor annoyance but not a show stopper. Yesterday that update gadget reported 34 packages to update, so I bring up Discover and it reports 31 actual packages, as usual. But since yesterday the top line where it is supposed to display buttons for 'Check for updates' and 'Update All' are completely greyed out! I thought maybe there might be some more packages that needed to be added to this drop before they were enabled for update - but no change since yesterday.

So, am I the only one experiencing this? -=Ken=-

[dequire]

OK, here's my experience:

<snip>But since yesterday the top line where it is supposed to display buttons for 'Check for updates' and 'Update All' are completely greyed out! I thought maybe there might be some more packages that needed to be added to this drop before they were enabled for update - but no change since yesterday.

So, am I the only one experiencing this? -=Ken=-

Usually, when the buttons are grayed out it means that Discover cannot access the APT update protocol because it thinks it is in use by something else. What happens if you do a full upgrade from the command line, and then re-run Discover (perhaps after a re-boot)?

At one time I will agree that Discover was incredibly buggy. And in fact, really not that usable due to its unreliable nature. I am now on plasma 5.14.4, so Ken I am not sure why you are on an older version unless your signature is not up to date. These days, Discover just works like a champ. A few days ago the new Frameworks released and Discover downloaded all three-hundred and something packages and installed without issue. Since my clean install of 18.04 Neon it just seems to work. I also like that you can put in a software review right from within the app! Additionally, I appreciate being able to download plasmoids, color schemes, Etc. from within as well. The integration with the OpenDesktop.org website is really starting to shine.

The only thing that is not really working for me at the moment is viewing wallpapers from within the add-ons section. It will sit there and say "still looking" indefinitely. A minor niggle and I will look to file a bug report (already reported by someone else), but otherwise I can't say enough regarding how impressive it is to see just how far Discover has come in the last year or so. We old hacks may really not care about the idea of "software centers" too much one way or the other. But as far as Linux desktop adoption goes, things like this are where we can really shine.

[kenj70]

Hi @dequire.

I updated my signature line. I am running 5.14.4 as well.

After three days and getting another set of updates which I couldn't install with Discover I went to the command line and noticed some unresolved dependencies - which I was able to clear up. Now I am back to having "only" 5 packages to update. And when I run Discover I get just two system updates available but no way to 'Update All' since the button is greyed out. The two files are 'GNOME Application Platform' and 'KDE Application Platform.'

I went through the upgrade in place from 16.04 to 18.04 and I have had some anomalies. For instance there is the XSANE scanner driver that has some sort of unresolvable dependency. So, I have been limping along, still getting useful stuff done, but thinking I might have to do a clean install to get things really right.

-=Ken=-