KDE Plasma's Discover Software Store Sill Improving, Gaining New Features For Plasma 5.16

The Discover Software Store is seeing new features and fixes coming down the pipe for KDE Applications 5.16. Checking the relevant sources, it's apparent that the devs have been busy once again here.

Discover Software Store

Here's what's New In The Discover Software Store For Plasma 5.16 So Far

• Discover’s Updates page - Apps and packages now have distinct “downloading” and “installing” phases, whereby after an item has finished installing, it disappears from view
• Discover now displays a busy indicator to show that it’s actually doing something while checking for updates...
• Discover’s tasks completion indicator now uses a real progress bar, which looks much nicer (<--- This should make users particularly happy)
• Improved support for AppImages and other apps that come from store.kde.org
• This means Discover will natively and OTTB (Out Of The Box) support Snaps via Snapcraft.io), Flatpaks (via Flathub.org), and AppImages (presumably via OpenDesktop.org's Appimage Store) 
• The sources menu now shows the version number for each different source for that app 
• Improved reliability dealing with content from store.kde.org
• Discover will now allow a user to force quit when installation or update operations are proceeding (or stuck...so use with caution)

What's not clear as of yet is whether the improved KDE Store support also means Discover utilizes the "ocs-url" protocol, or what is exactly meant by this new functionality beyond the stated handling of AppImages from the KDE Store.

It is nice to see the combined back-end, including the distribution's native packages, seamlessly integrated (or at least more so) together. The user should not care where the sources are from (as long as they are trusted), or in what format they come in. In the end, most just want the latest stable version on the software they want to use.

Additionally, many bug fixes have come down the line as well. Plasma Discover continues to see development and bug-fixes, and had certainly come a long way in the last 24 months or so.

Plasma 5.16 will release in June of this year.