This is intended as an improvement suggestion for consideration.
I’m using Fedora 41 KDE spin, one of the things I noticed that’s annoying is that when you install a flatpak app and see it in the KDE application launcher the flatpak app looks the same as a normal rpm based app.
Flatpaks should really show differently in the menus. What I do now is manually edit all the flatpak app menu items to append a label “(flatpak)” to the app so I know when I’m launching a flatpak app (like the attached example I’ve done this for “Slack” and “Teams for Linux”).
I want to suggest that the project consider some way to make flatpaks look different in the launcher automatically (some kind of flag in the GUI) or have a standard text always added like “(flatpak)” to the Name/Description, etc.
The reason I think someone would want to know it’s a flatpak is they tend to use more cpu/ram resources so they’d want to know up front.
Most users won’t know what flatpak even is, it’s all supposed to be seamless. As for the reason you gave, I doubt people would need to know that upfront - if they want to open an app, chances are they don’t have an alternative installed anyway, so they are going to open it regardless of how it’s packaged. And if they do have a different one, it may very well be the case that the flatpak is lighter than the rpm; in any case they will just use whichever they prefer. That said, I wouldn’t be against an option somewhere in Plasma. But I’m pretty sure this will never happen for GNOME and most other desktops.
The only time I could see this making sense is when you have both flatpak and rpm (or snap or appimage, for that matter) versions of the same app installed. In that case it might be cool for desktops to automatically label them differently.
Well that’s the exact situation I have, I have two “Teams” installed, one is the old beta rpm from MS and the other is the flatpak. The way it is now I have to drill down into the “edit application” look in the “Application” tab and confirm if the “Program” says “/usr/bin/flatpak” or not. I’d prefer if the app in the menu had something to show it’s a flatpak. So what I did was edit the Description and Name to have (flatpak) on the end