Changing the default picks in the software center

[Richard Hughes]

Hi,

I've been talking to a few people at DevConf here in Brno. One thing
people kept asking was how we chose the "picked" apps in the software
center we show on the overview panel. At the moment there's a list of
applications we consider worth featuring on the front page, or a
random rotation, which for upstream is chosen by the GNOME designers.
Perhaps in the long term we can use the usage data from Fedora tagger
as well, although we maybe we want to keep a "chosen" list to have a
coherent set of high quality applications to showcase, that are not
installed by default.

I don't know what the direction of Fedora.next is going to do in
regards to workstation spins and alternate desktops, but it probably
makes sense to recommend and promote different apps when running the
software center on XFCE, MATE and LXDE. Possibly also for KDE,
although that's possibly more controversial as it's going to feel
quite like a non-native app. SIGs might also want to do something else
too, although I'd argue perhaps providing a slightly different UI for
installing all the apps for "robotics" or "3d printing" might be a
better thing to do here.

So I'm basically asking, do other desktops *want* to change the list
of featured apps? The only prerequisite is that the application needs
AppData, although that can be provided by the packager rather than
upstream as a fallback. If so let me know and I'll write up some docs
on what gnome-software needs in terms of data. There's also a few
other data files for things like defining a base set of libraries
required for the desktop (e.g. gtk3 for GNOME) and also a list of core
components you can't casually upgrade by double clicking on a .rpm
file (e.g. kernel, glibc). Both lists are wonderfully under-researched
and incomplete, and hopefully will be more fleshed out when we know
what's happening with products / spins / rings thing.

Richard