Draft: Add "Group by Type" button to ApplicationListPage view.
To summarize the discussion from this issue and its duplicates, and to add my own take:
To the best of my knowledge, Discover is presented to new users as the primary tool for managing installed software. As it stands however, the user experience at this task is currently subpar.
Once many system packages, Flatpak apps, Flatpak libraries, add-ons, etc are installed it becomes extremely difficult execute simple queries about the system as the installed page gets clogged with flatpak runtimes and themes.
This first commit adds a binary "Group by Type" button, which divides the list into categories, grouped using the internal "Category" tag (Application, Add-on, Technical). This affects all "ApplicationsListPage" views, mainly the "Installed" page and search pages.
This isn't as in-depth as some of the other proposals, but I believe it is a good start. Ideally, this button would be expanded into a dropdown in the future, with additional grouping options such as by backend, user-facing category, or installed status.
Example pain-point user paths addressed by this MR:
- "What applications have I installed?"
- Currently, applications are interspersed with everything else, meaning that just to see what user-facing apps I have installed takes 10x more scrolling than I want it
- This is one of the most common reasons I open Discover, and is echoed by the duplicates on the original issue. The hypothetical normal user probably clicks on the "Installed" page in the "App Store" to see what applications are installed, so that information should be at the top or easily accessible. I generally don't care what Flatpak runtimes or dependencies are installed because I know an app requested them, so why do I have to scroll past them?
- "What matrix chat apps can I install?"
- A good example is searching for "Matrix" in Discover. I did this looking for matrix chat clients, but ended up getting a million cool hax0r matrix wallpapers with an occasional application I was looking for in the mix.
- On my main machine, searching for "Firefox" puts it at item 175 of 176 once everything has loaded.
- Searching in general is very tedious when Plasma addons are shown next to applications, and in my opinion removes some of the legitimacy of the results if the new-user experience is to search for one specific thing and get a bunch of questionable wallpapers.
Adding a "Group by Type" option makes a clear divide between applications, addons, and system tools, allowing me to quickly jump to the result I want without hiding any of them.
Note: this is my first MR for KDE and my first time ever working with QML/QT. Please forgive me if I ask something stupid