Variety of app sources
Do these stores give you enough choice?
The number of available applications is, of course, never cut and dry, because it depends on the Linux distributions. But a lot of thing still happen on the store side. Thus we treated the PackageKit back-end of the three stores that depended on it as a one single entity, no matter how many programs it could retrieve using conventional packages (DEBs, RPMs and so on).
We tried to identify extra sources of new software that could bring us more cool stuff, and that indeed bore some fruit. Scoring more points in this test means that a software store brings a valid improvement over traditional package managers – not only in user friendliness, but in terms of the actual value. And so we tried to uncover the ways to use portable application formats such as Flatpak, Snap and AppImage, as well as seeing if it was easy enough to enable these options in our stores.