14 DAY TRIAL // Ex-Kubuntu maintainer Jonathan Riddell is proud to report on the public availability of a new online service designed as a replacement for the services provided by openDesktop.org.
Dubbed The KDE Store, the new software store is exactly that, a store where application developers can publish their open-source projects and share them with the world. Also known as KDE Software Store, the app sharing platform contains much of the code from the openDesktop.org website, which appears to no longer be functional.
The migration from the openDesktop.org services to the new KDE Software Store has happened in the background for a while now, and it appears that those who are using the latest KDE Plasma desktop and KDE Applications software suite were also using the new store, most probably without them noticing it.
"Today, KDE announced that the source code for this new service has been released as Free software under the AGPL, fixing a long standing bug in KDE software: reliance on a proprietary web service. The source code for this new web service has been incubated into KDE and is now actively developed under the KDE umbrella," says Jonathan Riddell.
Renowned KDE developer Sebastian Kügler also talks about the new KDE Software Store on his personal blog, revealing the fact that users might be able to soon download their favorite open source applications in the new Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage binary formats, which allows you to use those apps on any distro that supports them.
He also teases users with upcoming improvements to the new KDE Software Store. "We have great plans for the store, one of them being that we want to offer download of binary packages through bundled formats such as Flatpak, Snappy and/or AppImage."