I noticed the AppOutlet repo has been archived, but I really liked the idea of one store to rule them all (I.e. snaps, appimages, flatpaks, etc. in one place).
Any current recommendations for an alternative?
Ah yes, the most misused xkcd. AppOutlet isn’t a new standard. It’s a frontend which attempts to support all of the existing standards. There is no special AppOutlet package format or repository. It’s simply an application that can install Snaps, AppImages and Flatpaks, which you would be installing anyway through other means.
This is like looking at VLC’s support for dozens of multimedia formats and calling it a new standard. VLC isn’t a multimedia format, it’s a multimedia player. It implements the existing multimedia standards, it isn’t itself supposed to be one.
You won’t find any alternatives because Flatpak has won the war. Pretty much everyone (except Canonical) hates Snap and avoids it like the plague, and AppImages have significantly dropped in popularity amongst users due to the rise of Flatpak, and the various advantage it has over AppImages. So you’re left with only Flatpak/Flathub basically.
In that case, any one stop shop on Arch that will search the Arch repo, the AUR, and Flathub?
I am using pamac-all on archlinux, which is kind of like that. It works only on arch linux afaik. It has the repos, AUR, flatpak, and snap support.
Thanks for the suggestion. After getting some weird behavior with Appimage Launcher and reading this reddit thread, I decided to install pamac-flatpak from the AUR, but plan on leaving AUR dissabled on the app. So far so good. I think it’s a keeper.
I love GNOME, but Gnome Software is hot garbage. If KDE gets their gtk/adwaita tweaks in place, I might recommend Discover instead.
Also, arguably, by the most argumentative people, AppStream is also hot garbage, which is what was supposed to solve your problem regarding “too many package managers”.
I personally would wish AppStream didn’t suck and that it was also aware of NPM and crate packages. They’ve sort of been forgotten or relegated “developer tools”… even though you can pull full applications and system libraries.
How many “it’s 2025 already” problems do we have to encounter this year?
