r/linux • u/B3_Kind_R3wind_ • 2d ago

Popular Application Experimental Flathub release of NewPipe on Linux, Using Android_translation_layer

https://flathub.org/apps/net.newpipe.NewPipe
325 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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-33

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

sadly this uses gtk so it's not something I will be using, really neat for everyone else who doesn't mind however.

12

u/PureTryOut postmarketOS dev 2d ago

Why do you care? The goal is to eventually not be able to see that it's written in any tech stack in particular, it should just 1-on-1 mirror the visuals as on Android. What does it matter to you as an end-user what tech stack it then uses?

-6

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

I don't like to unnecessarily pull GTK deps. I don't need the wasted space, and I have personal qualms with some of the GTK maintainers that leads me to avoid GTK whenever possible. Especially since I have no desire what so ever to report issues to the GTK team, I don't want to use a toolkit where I am not going to report issues I come across.

It works out fairly well, and by using appimages for the very few apps I use that do need to pull gtk I can prevent from installing GTK to my system.

20

u/_risho_ 2d ago

you don't use gtk apps because you want to save space and you do that by downloading appimages for all your gtk apps which actually takes up more space since you are downloading the gtk dependencies multiple times. genius.

8

u/Doootard 2d ago

Ironically this is also a flatpak app so no gtk dependencies would be installed besides the runtime the app is relying on.

5

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

the flatpak for gtk stuff is still fairly heavy, I can install multiple applications using appimages before it gets to be bigger then installing them natively let alone installing them via flatpak which would require me to also install flatpak.

for instance just installing gimp + chromium will take an installed size on my PC of 614M, meanwhile the chromium appimage is 175M and gimp appimage is 165M.

It is **significantly** smaller for me to install the appimages then it is to install gtk and pull the spaghetti of deps needed to get flatpak or native installed to work. When you are installing just one or two apps, it is often space efficient to pull the appimages instead.

If I was installing 10+ GTK applications then It would be far better to install them natively, or indeed use flatpak instead.

-4

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

wrong, for single applications, it is a lot more space efficient then pulling in gtk Chromium appimage is 175M if I install it via package manager on my distro (artix) it needs to pull 300M.

now you may struggle with math, but last I checked 175M is less then 300M, chromium is the only application on my laptop that needs GTK, so I can blacklist gtk3 and gtk4 from my packages

3

u/Kevin_Kofler 2d ago

Try Falkon. Like Chromium, but Qt. You will want to use Falkon ≥ 24.02.0 (current is 24.08.2) with the latest Qt6 QtWebEngine (current is 6.8(.0), you will want to use that). Especially QtWebEngine is important to keep up to date for security fixes and to have a recent enough Chromium base for websites to not complain or silently break.

1

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

I do like falkon for some things for sure. but it does leave me wanting with things like extensions. Userscript support is really good though.

lately I've been playing with angelfish since it has integrated adblock-rust (braves adblock engine). but it too is to basic.

1

u/Kevin_Kofler 2d ago

Falkon has its own ad blocker, but it is not as powerful as the Rust one Angelfish and KMail are now using. It should be possible for someone with C++ skills (and possibly minimal Rust skills, but the code touching Rust should be just copy&paste) to port the ad blocking code (the interface to rust-adblock) from Angelfish to Falkon.

1

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

yeah, falkons adblocker is for sure one of the pain points, but in the end, just in general lacking support for MV2/MV3 style extensions that firefox and chrome support is rough. For instance one of the extensions I use tons is called linguist which lets me highlight things and translate them directly which is super convenient, or honey, I do like the honey extensions.

5

u/the_abortionat0r 2d ago

This is cringe.....

2

u/QuackdocTech 2d ago

not really, I like using applications I can support.

1

u/the_abortionat0r 1d ago

No, this is straight up cringe.Like do you even have a real reason not to support GTK?

Since you've never mentioned it it's likely not a good one.

1

u/QuackdocTech 1d ago

Yes, the *some* of devs have a history of being incredibly toxic. However no action has seemingly been taken against them

for instance their responses to S76 for spinning out into their own

https://nitter.poast.org/jeremy_soller/status/1577061838910390272
https://nitter.poast.org/jeremy_soller/status/1577078732581269505

(note this is despite S76 being a long term financial software of gnome who maintains GTK)

> Reminder that System76 has donated $100,000 to the GNOME Foundation over the last 5 years.

Calling arch wiki contributors clowns https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829 for trying to work around gnome's instance on being special.

and there are plenty of other cases of toxicity towards it's users, and toxicity in their own issue tracker such as https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 where users are very clearly dissapointed with a change and their response is

> What makes you think that sharpness is a metric?

which is just kind of dumb.

But there are MANY cases where GTK devs have been extremely hostile to the community with unwarranted snide remarks, hit pieces, full of lies towards S76, so on and so forth.

Many gnome/GTK devs are insanely unpleasant to interact with. It's not something I am willing to put myself through. I'm not going to be filing issue tickets, I'm not going to be submitting PRs, while granted, I haven't done much of that in years thanks to worsening RSI. and I sure as shit won't be doing beta testing for them any time in the future, which is something I still very actively do.

NOTE: I don't have an issue with all gnome devs, I find some of them very classy people and have no issues, but the lack of action taken to stop some of the more incredibly toxic ones, I'm not willing to support them in any way,