Hello. I would like to discuss the metadata guidelines and the curation for Flathub applications mentioned in this Flathub blog post titled “Raising the Bar: Introducing the new App Metadata Guidelines”, published on January 2024.
As of July 2024, the applications showcased among the “curated lists of apps”, “seasonal/topical recommendations” and in “App of the day”, have always been GNOME applications built using the libadwaita toolkit. Applications from other “platforms” such as KDE Plasma seem to have been completely left out and neglected.
I would like to know if this is because non-GNOME apps like Krita are failing to meet the necessary high-quality metadata guidelines (“Short descriptions, good icons, correctly sized screenshots with good content”) and if so, is there anything users such as myself can do to help, such as providing “correctly sized screenshots” to the maintainers of such Flathub applications? Or does the curation filter out any application not built using the libadwaita toolkit?
I was also looking at the “Tags” mentioned near the bottom of each Flathub application’s page. I was not able to find any application tagged with “gnome”, “kde”, “gtk”, “qt” and other similar tags. Since most of the applications of Flathub primarily target a single platform like GNOME or KDE Plasma, shouldn’t the users be allowed to filter out applications for such platforms? (Although, right now searching for a tag on Flathub is the same as searching for something on the website’s search bar, making the “Tags” feature redundant).
As it currently stands, I feel Flathub does not make applications more “discoverable” unless it is a GNOME application. The recommendation and promotion system also feel extremely GNOME-centric while applications designed for other platforms get no spotlight. For example, with the imminent release of Pop!_OS COSMIC, wouldn’t showcasing libcosmic applications like Oboete be helpful for Pop!_OS users?
Please note I do not intend to start any kind of negative discussion about which desktop environment is superior. I was led to believe that Flathub is a neutral ground to highlight the best applications for desktop Linux users. I was also recommended that the Flathub Discourse would be the most appropriate place for this post.
This is also my first post on this forum. If I am breaking any rules then please let me know.