But the GTK 4 UI is the attraction here, especially for Arch Linux newcomers who want to get things done quickly.
That alone reads as the author of the text wrote the text they wrote just to generate something on the topic. In other words, that article was mostly useless to me, if not for a few screenshots in it.
Quickly is not the appropriate word here. If I’d like to install something, I’d do it sudo pacman -Syu firefox in terminal, and you cannot beat that. Even for a newcomer, especially if they are comfortable with CLI. (As a macOS refugee, I was pretty at home with Linux terminal.) Even when they are not, I personally know non-computer people I guided to open terminal and paste the command, then press enter. Nothing is quicker than that.
What it potentially gives us is the GUI for people who want to do something on their own, without learning even the tiniest bits of new things, like why the fuck Ctrl + C does something weird, and Ctrl + V is not a key for pasting that word they coped with the chat with me.
My take, that would be just another abandonware. Won’t be surprised the whole thing is heavily vibe coded, as much as the 9to5 article. Normally, I don’t even read or comment that. It’s that I think both Gnome and KDE Software App Stores front ends could do better, UX wise. So I was curious about this solution to the problem. Another Synaptic I’ve been trying with Ubuntu like 20 years ago, not really understanding what it does and why. I see no difference here. Not saying nobody needs it, but I don’t see much of an improvement from the first glance. And not much motivation to explore that further. If the author reflects on whys and hows somewhere, I might explore though.