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I created a script that always installs apps from their official source
https://github.com/Tsu-gu/appfetch/
It's a proof of concept of an idea I had a while ago. I dislike having to hunt down apps for my Linux machine when I want them from an official source. Some apps are packages as tarballs, some as .debs, some as install scripts that download a binary, some are flatpaks and snaps.
I created a yaml file with only verified apps from flathub and snapcraft, and added a few apps outside of them that I could think of.
The ultimate goal is the user just typing the names of what they want, and the script will just get it. They shouldn't waste time with picking the right source.
Its cool to see this xkcd in action.
That being said theres a couple options out here attempting the same thing, but due to the required level of trust youre fighting a bit of an uphill battle for widespread adoption.
Not that this changes how cool of a tool it is and valuable for you use case!
Could you link some of those other options? I tried searching for something similar and found nothing. I know about LURE which got abandoned and didn't have the same goal.
Heres the biggest and most active I could quickly find, but I believe the XKCD in that repo inspired a handful of similar projects
I did check it out and it's really cool, but here's the big difference
I want to install audacity and it ran all of the commands for search via the package managers. My script will do this:
Check the database and finds an entry I made, because as it turns out, the only official audacity package is an AppImage built for Ubuntu 22.04. So it launches a command that retrieves the latest AppImage even if I don't update the database as it tries to fetch the latest version number and download the appimage based on that.
Ignore the .1, this is from a VM I test the app on and it's a mess
TLDR: mpm runs search commands for all package manager, my script's database was created manually. This means a lot of apps will be missing but when I come across something that's not there, I add it. Whether this approach is a good idea in the long run, I don't know. I just felt like creating a proof of concept of the idea.