Purpose and future of the "Featured" page
Right now when you launch Discover, you see the "Featured" page that shows a couple apps which are defined at https://autoconfig.kde.org/discover/featured-5.9.json:
This page suffer from a few problems:
- Information density is very low
- There's no clear pattern or reason for how an app gets here. The set of apps never changes, so it isn't clearly some kind of rotating "apps featured this week" view. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431316.
- The apps chosen seem rather random. Some are KDE apps, some aren't. Some are basic with broad usefulness to everyone (Kolourpaint) while others are very specialized (KDenlive, KMyMoney, Blender, InkScape, Digikam)
I think this page is not ideal for those reasons, and suffers from a lack of direction. I'd like to propose a new direction: turn it into a quick way for people to install commonly-used apps that might not have been pre-installed with their distro. Apps in the list that are either not available or already installed would be hidden, to keep the page relevant. In essence we turn the page into a convenient way to get your system set up quickly, with the following apps listed, separated into categories:
Chat
- Discord
- MS Teams
- NeoChat
- Skype
- Telegram
- Zoom
Documents
- Gwenview
- LibreOffice
- Okular
Games
- GCompris
- Steam
Graphics
- GIMP
- Kolourpaint
- Krita
Media
- Spotify
- VLC
Utilities
- Filelight
- KWrite
- OBS
- Partition Manager
- Warpinator
(note: set of apps is just a suggestion; open to ideas)
Since this would increase the number of apps that would generally appear on the page, I would recommend increasing the information density as well, with smaller cards.