[www.kde.org] [Bug 467421] Button in KDE apps website is misleading, doesn't have flatpaks/snaps/etc. on it

[Nate Graham]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=467421

Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Resolution|WAITINGFORINFO              |INTENTIONAL
             Status|NEEDSINFO                   |RESOLVED

--- Comment #4 from Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> ---
Installing apps generally works differently in Linux compared to on Windows and
macOS where it's more common to download binaries from a website. This can take
some getting used to, but we can't assume all our users are unfamiliar with
this concept, since you generally only need to get used to it once and then
it's done.

If we're looking for maximum precision, changing "Install on Linux" to "Search
in Discover" would still not do it since strictly speaking Discover isn't
required; the button simply opens an appstream:// URL and any app that handles
those URLs can launch, not just Discover. Also, the user might not have
Discover installed. We would have to invent a very long and cumbersome piece of
text to handle all of these situations if we want to achieve maximum precision
to explain what will happen when you click the button.

But even if we did, we would be undoing the important design goal of having a
big obvious "Click here to install" button on the web page. In the past we
didn't have this and we got a lot of questions about how to actually install
these apps, and criticisms for omitting such a button. Adding the button fixed
that. Yes, we now miss the edge case where your distro hasn't packaged the KDE
app you click the button for, but this is IMO an acceptable trade-off in the
service of making the UX better for people using distros with adequately large
software repos, or with Flathub or Snap enabled by default. Discover itself
even handles this case by showing you a screen that explains that the app isn't
available in your distro's repos and you should go bug your distro to make it
available.

I don't think there's anything we can change here without regressing something
significant, sorry.

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