Flatpak has long established itself as the distribution-agnostic standard for software delivery on Linux. Some immutable Linux distributions even rely on it exclusively, given the nature of their design.
While experienced users often prefer managing Flatpaks through the command line, the majority—particularly newcomers—tend to favor graphical tools. Options like Warehouse already exist, but there’s always room for a fresh approach.
One of the latest is Bazaar—a new app store designed for GNOME, focused on discovering and installing applications and add‑ons through Flatpak remotes—especially Flathub. Released just two months ago, the project is quickly gaining traction and already has more than 800 stars on GitHub. And for good reason.
It doesn’t just replicate existing tools. Instead, it’s built to be fast and highly multi‑threaded, so you can queue up endless downloads while browsing for new releases without missing a beat. That’s possible because the UI is completely decoupled from backend operations.
Actually, the app runs as a background service, meaning it keeps your download and installation state intact even when you close the window. For deeper desktop integration, it supports GNOME Shell’s search provider interface over D-Bus. KDE users aren’t left out either, with a KRunner plugin available for quick app lookups.
In my tests, Bazaar ran impressively fast, handling multiple Flatpak installs simultaneously without a hitch. On top of that, its clean, minimalist design still manages to pack in all the features you’d expect. It’s also worth noting that the app features a “curated” tab, which distros can customize to provide a more localized or branded experience.
Thanks to these qualities, despite being pretty new, Bazaar has already caught the eye of some distros. In fact, it’s now the default app store in the immutable Bluefin Linux, a Fedora Silverblue-based distro, taking the place of GNOME Software.
The only real drawback is that while the app runs fine on KDE, it feels a little out of place. That makes sense, though, since Bazaar was built around the GNOME design guidelines and tailored specifically for this desktop. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but either way, having support for deeper KDE integration/decoration would be a big plus.
To learn more about Bazaar, check out the app’s GitHub page. You can install it from Flathub.
It’s built into Bazzite and runs really well! I’m impressed!
Are we sure Linux needs Flatpak, Snap, and Appimage? I am not.
I am not either.
Flatpaks in particular are similar bundled packages that made everyone run far away from Windows because it was apps management middle age.
Red Hat is pushing it hard for their corporate purposes, try to undermine the competition hard, and they created a fake sense of community via bots to make it look like people actually care about it, but it’s still failing hard.
Snaps even managed to emerge from the fake flatpak community nonsense and gain traction, whereas Flatpaks stagnate at best.
What I meant is that snaps is the lesser of two evils, but they’re barely better than flatpaks, and ideally we need neither for a modern and robust packaging system.