Here are my two cents as someone who published one application on Flathub that passes most guidelines and uses Gnome tech: http://ten-forward.sgued.fr/
Gnome optimizes very well for the case of “one developer wants to automate something or build a specific tool”, leading to a decent number of high-polish, limited functionality apps:
- Libadwaita provides a very good set of default widget that look very good and integrate very well with Flatpak and the linux desktop: portals, dark/light theme, Wayland support, accessibility (to the extend it’s possible on current Linux)
- Libadwaita is accessible from multiple languages, especially Rust, which has a community that want to be able to build GUI, and Python, which is a pretty decent language and easy to learn, and JavaScript for Dev coming from the web. QT on the other hand is native to C++ and thus has very poor bindings in Rust (based on what I hear. I’ve not tried them myself). I’m not aware of many KDE apps using Python, even though it appears to be possible. So you’re limited to C++ and JS, not languages I want to use.
- Gnome provides some templates for logos, which allowed me to create on my own a logo that looks passable.
- The screenshots are expected to be taken on Gnome, which include user shadows (looks like KDE also does that, but Sway which I use does not have that functionality, so I took my screenshots on Gnome), Cosmic (currently at least) doesn’t include a shadow either.
There are a ton of very small apps using gnome, because Gnome makes it very efficient to build such apps, but at the same time there are fewer “large” gnome apps, like Krita or Kdenlive (sure there’s GIMP, Firefox, LibreOffice that use GTK, but they seem much further from Gnome since not using its design patterns).
Overall my fell is that Gnome tech currently have the best DX for just getting started and building a simple app. I believe we can expect Libcosmic to also have a strong presence in the future for similar reasons, though maybe on a smaller scale due to missing functionality that will take a while to arrive and the lack of bindings for non-Rust languages.
This is coming from someone that does not enjoy Gnome as a DE, but likes a lot of the UI design of Libadwaita.
I published on Flathub because it makes it work across every distro, and doing that is what pushed me to “polish” my app with a logo, good descriptions and changelogs, since that was important in making it have a nice page.
I think the guidelines are mostly good! Maybe there should also be some efforts to clean-up the pages of older apps like Gimp and LibreOffice, which are still maintained but have old screenshots that don’t look good. The same applies to proprietary apps.
Maybe also the screenshots should be allowed to not be screenshots ? This might help more “corporate” apps. I’m thinking of allowing things that are more “designed” like the play store listing for Firefox:
Given that my app is for a niche use case. I could see myself trying to be more descriptive of what it’s for in my screenshots, but the guidelines ask for “Just the app window”.
The only guideline my app fails to pass is the non-technical summary, but I don’t really know how to solve that given that my app is pretty niche.