Your comment got me thinking... Is this a big deal, or even a small deal?
I think it's a deal of some proportion. If someone is trying out Linux for the first time and stumbles across how Flatpaks work and starts exploring Flathub, maybe their initial impression will be good enough to consider switching. If something appears to be polished, then maybe it is.
Perception is reality; while hardcore nerds are willing to roll their own distributions, there’s a reason Ubuntu is damn popular. Most normal people want their computers to work, and to have an easy discoverable ecosystem.
Lol how the fuck do you browse packages? Did they forget to add a link to "apps" or something to the top menu?
You have to keep scrolling down the front page and look at categories and maybe press "More Productivity" and you get to see the packages in that category. But you can't browse all packages and you can't get a list of all categories.
I'm not seeing any filters? If I press the search field I just get a prompt.
I saw there's a slash sign in a square but I can't figure out what it's for. If I click it it dissapears, if I type "/" in the bar I get nothing.
Edit: so if you press the search button with nothing written you get to https://flathub.org/apps/search which is a somewhat more useful page. The default listing there is still garbage because it's hard-limited to 1000 apps for some reason but there's no pagination and no sorting(?). But at least you get a filter bar on the left so there's that.
Also if you scroll aaaall the way down to the footer of the page there are some links to "collections" such as "trending" and shit. Which has pagination but no filters and no sorting. 😆 And the distinction between the "trending" and "popular" collections is left as an exercise for the user, I suppose.
It's like it was designed by someone who's never seen or used a package repository in their life.
Yet, we still don't have a proper way to mirror the parts (or the entire) repository and/or have useful offline archives of flatpaks for certain cases.
It's not supposed to compete with actual package repos so not sure if it would benefit from something like that. The whole thing is amateur hour, amateur implementation mainly targeted at beginners and niche use cases. It fulfills a very specific need and does it well and at the end of the day that's the Unix philosophy. So I don't think it should try to be something it's not.
While I share your views about being amateur hours we've been seeing an increase in usage and releases on it. At this rate flatpak/flathub will become the defacto way of getting desktop software for Linux and it does solve a lot of annoyances and makes things more secure however it lacks features.