
Audacious 4.0 released, switches from GTK to Qt 5 - jrepinc
https://audacious-media-player.org/news/45-audacious-4-0-released
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overgard
GTK integration in terms of look and feel on windows and macos has been so bad
for so long that I think the only valid use case for it is if you're targeting
gnome specifically.

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edgarvm
Qt's license and cost is another valid reason to continue developing on GTK

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cztomsik
Both reasons are why I'm trying to develop an OSS alternative with easiness &
platform-independence of the web but much lower system requirements than what
electron has.

I'm currently close to prealpha, if you're interested.
[https://github.com/cztomsik/graffiti/](https://github.com/cztomsik/graffiti/)

~~~
jamesgeck0
Under project scope, there's this statement:

> To name just a few things you usually don't need: ... flawless i18n &
> accessibility

Lack of basic accessibility support is (or should be) a complete nonstarter
for any serious project.

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DonHopkins
I'd demand better than basic accessibility support!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwSh0dAaqIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwSh0dAaqIA)

~~~
cztomsik
you can join the effort and help me, the scope is limited to something I can
do myself in reasonable time :-)

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ssivark
Back in the day when I used desktop music players on linux I cycled through a
whole bunch: Audacious, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, Songbird(Mozilla!),
Moc(Oh, so minimal!), Cmus, mpd (server/client), and probably more that I'm
forgetting now.

Feel a touch nostalgic for the uncomplicated time when I had music on my
devices, regularly "organized my music library" and could play whatever
whenever, and shared them with friends. I can still rummage through my old
disks and spin up some of that music from time to time.

Mostly use cloud players these days; crazy to imagine that there's nothing I
can do if my favorite song/recording today is not available ten years later!

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nine_k
Buy music, don't rent it. Pay for downloadable files, or for physical media if
you are into it.

This is rather widely available.

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RussianCow
It's significantly more expensive if you listen to a wide range of music.
Buying albums, or even just individual songs, can very quickly surpass the
$10/month you pay for Spotify. Maybe that's worth it to you, but I can't blame
most people for just paying for a subscription.

~~~
KozmoNau7
The issue is control. Albums are regularly disappearing from the Spotify
catalogue, sometimes reappearing later. Sometimes specific albums in a band's
history are missing because that particular label doesn't have an agreement
with Spotify. And you never know if it's a crappy modern brickwalled remaster.
Not to mention the woefully bad curation, mixed up artists, incorrect
genres/years, you name it.

With music you buy, _you_ are in control.

It's about quality over quantity.

~~~
distances
Same with video streaming. With Netflix you aren't guaranteed the show won't
suddenly just disappear before you finish it -- happened multiple times for
me. I've been partly going back to Blu-ray for better availability and picture
quality. Netflix is still very good for exploratory watching though, but Blu-
ray is very very good for stuff like classic HBO series and BBC nature
documentaries.

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toastercup
Audacious is pretty slick (especially with this latest release), but lacks the
features that foobar2000 has that I need (namely, a directory/folder view that
can replace the active playlist when clicked).

If anyone is looking for a decent foobar2000 alternative, Foobnix
([https://github.com/foobnix/foobnix](https://github.com/foobnix/foobnix)) has
worked really well for me. It has some rough edges and doesn't seem (that)
actively maintained, but it gets the important stuff right. Haven't come
across anything else quite like it for Linux yet, unfortunately.

If there was a foobar-like folder view plugin for Audacious, I'd switch to it
in a heartbeat.

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Arnavion
I just run foobar2000 under wine. The font rendering is a bit iffy (some lines
of text get clipped horizontally and vertically, as if the calculated
dimensions are smaller than the rendered dimensions), but it doesn't bother me
enough to investigate.

That said, most of my music listening these days has been pointing mpv at an
internet radio steam.

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toastercup
Yeah, foobar2000 has worked well under Wine for me in the past. It doesn't
work as well when playing music from my NAS via NFS, though..

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rubyn00bie
Kind of a tangent, but why switch from GTK to Qt 5? Or rather, why Qt 5 rather
than some other cross platform UI framework or even GTK 3? Is it ease of
porting it for new features compared to something else? And/or is Qt just that
much nicer to use?

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paride5745
GTK3 is becoming very GNOME3 specific, while Qt5 is still agnostic and easy to
port on different platforms.

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cycloptic
Can you elaborate? If you're talking about the client-side decorations in GTK,
those are up to the app developer to choose if they want them or not.

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ori_b
As a user, I don't want them, and I don't want the app developer to make that
choice for me.

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arghwhat
The developers makes _every_ decision on how an application works and looks
(It's _part of the code_ ). The top row of pixels is no different.

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infinity0
It feels like everyone someone voices an opinion about GTK3 explaining why
they don't like it, some GTK3 fanboy has to chime in questioning the opinion
and implying it isn't rational. Yeah, this makes me want to stick with GTK3
even less.

People don't have to explain their preferences in a rational way, they will
just switch away from GTK3. It's cheaper.

Successful developers will try to interpret these users' feedback in a self-
critical, introspective and positive way, and tweak their product based on the
feedback. As opposed to continually challenging the giver of the feedback to
explain their opinion in more detail, as if by repeatedly digging deeper and
deeper into an opinion, you will at some point find some fundamental logical
contradiction in their views that will make them re-evaluate their life
philosophy on why they just don't like GTK3.

I for one think the two opinions given above are perfectly clear ("GTK3 is
becoming very GNOME3 specific", "As a user, I don't want them") and can't see
why further clarification is being requested. If you really need clarification
on these perfectly clear opinions, it is your problem.

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wruza
I agree. Asking for deep details is like asking “what’s wrong with you”
instead of the reverse. Another show stopper for gtk is pretty trivial: it’s a
real pain in the ass to get a working set of dlls on windows. The most sane
way I know is to incrementally cut it from msys2 installation. That’s plain
stupid and is killing an already half-dead framework, which was pretty good at
the 2.x days. It locked itself into gnome, which is not even a crushing leader
on linux desktops.

~~~
cycloptic
I haven't tested it but I believe there is a "gtk" package in vcpkg that can
be used. Windows support should still work fine, but improving the experience
there has never really been a priority simply because of lack of developer
interest. Unlike Qt, there is no company behind it, it's open source managed
by a non-profit and anyone can work on it. Right now there are only ~2
developers contributing full-time and they work for Red Hat. So unless someone
else wants to hire developers to work on it, that's who is calling the shots
and they are going to focus on their platform.

I also don't really appreciate being called a "fanboy" by the GP. I use Qt as
well and I don't favor any framework over another. I'm sticking to the facts
here: GTK supports building apps any way you want, not just in the GNOME
style. Maybe the problem is that the apps you tried happen to all be GNOME-
styled apps. That's a choice that the app developers have to make consciously
and has nothing to do with GTK. If there is something else you mean by "locked
into GNOME" then please elaborate, because I am having trouble understanding
what you're referring to.

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newscracker
I always appreciate the perseverance and dedication of FOSS developers and
teams. They bring a lot to the table for a whole lot of people.

But something about the fonts and the UI layout always puts me off (primarily)
Linux targeted (or developed) applications. Even Windows 10 doesn’t use good
fonts, IMO. I don’t know why developers can’t use good native fonts or bundle
some good free fonts with the application, while also having better laid out
UIs. We live in the age of 4K monitors (though most people are still on 1080p
or lower) and smartphones with pretty good screens that many users are used
to, and yet we have applications that look like they were developed two
decades ago. Even large efforts like LibreOffice aren’t immune to these
deficiencies. I’m not arguing for form over function, but definitely see a
need for getting more UI designers into FOSS (I’m not one, so my contributions
are limited to monetary donations to projects I like or use).

To reiterate, this is not to put down the humongous efforts (which many a
times remain thankless or not adequate for putting food on the table) of FOSS
developers.

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nkkollaw
Most FOSS contributors are devs, and might even despite design.

They definitely prefer functionality over looks.

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randyrand
Any screenshots?

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jccalhoun
there's one on the front page: [https://audacious-media-
player.org/](https://audacious-media-player.org/)

~~~
cpach
According to the filename, that is an old version of Audacious (3.6).

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rudilee
Seems like the Qt5 front-end is just set as the default one, and the GTK
front-end will be deprecated. There wasn't really any noticeable difference
between both from the usability comparison in my opinion.

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Naac
Looks like this is moving from GTK2, not GTK3 ( latest ).

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MuffinFlavored
Does this mean GTK2 and GTK3 are... to be avoided for new projects / dead?

How do Qt projects look + feel when ported to Mac OS X? Do they look near
native or can you tell it's a Qt project and not a Cocoa project?

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jcelerier
> Does this mean GTK2 and GTK3 are... to be avoided for new projects / dead?

not dead but... here's for instance how Wireshark looked on macOS when it was
using GTK :

[https://blog.wireshark.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/osx-x1...](https://blog.wireshark.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/osx-x11.png)

and here's how it looks now that it is using Qt :

[https://news-
cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/wireshark-3-0-re...](https://news-
cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/wireshark-3-0-released-as-world-s-most-popular-
network-protocol-analyzer-525173-2.jpg)

~~~
ori_b
Yeah, nobody set a theme for GTK in that screenshot, and GTK themes tend to
look different from the native theme on non-Linux OSes regardless.

But, the trend is towards Electron, which also integrates poorly with the OS
-- so, I'm not sure how much looking native matters any more.

~~~
LaGrange
Eeh. It might be perception, but I feel like it was the other way around —
around the time iPhone came out, a lot of apps eschewed compliance in favour
of achieving clearer identity. I think that cleared the way for electron — I
actually vaguely remember some people talking about using html-based apps
because they made achieving a specific visual design easier, not because of
the portability benefits.

And for example AFAIK the new Apple Music app is using a web view for some
parts of itself, and as much as I like having "light" apps, I generally prefer
interacting with Electron UIs over most QT apps.

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aasasd
It's alive!

Which reminds me, foobar2000's Mac port seems to be chugging along—though not
open-source.

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strategarius
Natural selection in action. If you don't put enough effort for your framework
to catch up modern language features and design principles, users would
consider something else.

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modzu
just posting to say thank u and share some love for audacious

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Paianni
Cross-platform toolkits are the lazy way. Good quality graphical apps are
available in derivatives that match the interface guidelines and optimum
toolkits/APIs of their platforms.

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betenoire
I think I have a similar preference, but lazy and good are not mutually
exclusive

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DagAgren
In this case, though, they are. There are no good cross platform UI kits, and
there probably never will be.

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dependenttypes
> There are no good cross platform UI kits

Qt is one.

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ptx
It's certainly the best one IMHO, but not necessarily good.

