Audacious 4.0 released, switches from GTK to Qt 5

https://audacious-media-player.org/news/45-audacious-4-0-released

by jrepinc • 6 years ago

204 176 6 years ago

audacious-media-player.org

Naac• 6 years ago

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

MuffinFlavored• 6 years ago

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?

empyrical2• 6 years ago

Qt5 can be made to look pretty close to a native Mac app, but one thing I haven't figured out yet is if there's a way to get that "bouncy" effect you get when you scroll to either end of a list.

kelvie• 6 years ago

They don't look quite native, but I feel the trend is moving away from native-looking apps anyway (like via electron, or forgoing an UI at all and just doing a web UI).

jcelerier7• 6 years ago

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...

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

https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/wireshark-3-0-re...

chrisseaton3• 6 years ago

How do Qt projects look + feel when ported to Mac OS X?

They're in the uncanny valley.

baybal2• 6 years ago

GTK3 are... to be avoided for new projects / dead?

Despite rooting for GTK, I think this is where it is going.

A lot of criticism as of late was that GTK is turning from a Gimp ToolKit into a Gnome ToolKit, and you can see how dramatic was the drop in mindshare has been since that trend started.

Just like Gnome didn't really survive the 3.0 transition because the project been really stolen by thew few people who force fed Gnome Shell onto the wider community, the GTK did not survive the transition from GimpTK to GnomeTK.

cycloptic13• 6 years ago

I think GTK3 will still be viable for a least a few more years. It's currently in maintenance mode -- no new features will be added, and all feature development is happening in git master in preparation for the GTK4 release. The first release of GTK4 is currently planned for this fall.

aasasd7• 6 years ago

How do Qt projects look + feel when ported to Mac OS X?

I haven't seen any cross-platform toolkits that abide by Mac standards. Funny enough, the closest is Mozilla's toolkit. Other than that, there are always telltale signs—e.g. no one seems to grok Mac's toolbars even though they're organized by the basic laws of proximity and grouping. Qt apps have the lazy grid toolbars just crammed from left to right, occasionally with extra-large icons for the ‘designy’ look, and always with colorful icons unless something app-specific is made (like in Calibre). Plus the noisy dividers.

Also, since Qt handles all the graphics and input, it has to reimplement everything high-level that the systems provide out of the box, and presumably to track changes in all of that. Hence the past bugs of one-pixel offsets between elements where they can't be in the system. And the present non-support for system-wide key rebinding on Mac—e.g., home/end instead of cmd-left/right.

But yeah, Qt is better than something like not-obsessively-tuned Swing. As for GTK, it seems to depend a lot on the author specifically not forgetting to bundle the native-look theme.

pojntfx• 6 years ago

NO. GTK has really been getting more and more import for FLOSS as the Librem 5 and the vast majority (Ubuntu switched to GNOME by default, so GNOME is now the default on

- Ubuntu - Fedora - OpenSUSE - Debian - CentOS - ...

GTK+ since version 3 is really neat. They rust re-did the site as well: https://www.gtk.org

lmm• 6 years ago

Qt was always the better practical choice, and its license issues were sorted out decades ago. Couple that with a world where choosing C over C++ makes less and less sense (compilers having got a lot better) and the writing has been on the wall for years now.

puzzlingcaptcha2• 6 years ago

They did have a GTK3 port at one point (audacious 3.5) but walked back from it:

https://audacious-media-player.org/news/32-audacious-3-6-rel...

https://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/boards/1/topics/1...

randyrand• 6 years ago

Any screenshots?

MawKKe• 6 years ago

I just built it on ubuntu 18.04. It looks pretty much identical to the native 3.9 version, except for icons.

FYI anyone reading this, take a backup of your $HOME/.config/audacious before trying the new version. It did something funny there and no files would play on the old version anymore...

jccalhoun• 6 years ago

there's one on the front page: https://audacious-media-player.org/

cpach• 6 years ago

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

overgard• 6 years ago

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.

edgarvm• 6 years ago

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

emilsedgh• 6 years ago

Qt is free and LGPL for Audacious, any other FOSS app, or any other project that is not looking to ship a patched version of Qt.

mixedCase• 6 years ago

All the important parts of Qt are available under LGPLv3. This only makes a difference to you if you want to do Tivoization of your software (Gtk uses LGPLv2, this being the only major difference AFAIK). In which case you still have the option to buy a commercial license.

arendtio• 6 years ago

I thought the license issue was one of the past?

cztomsik3• 6 years ago

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/

simias• 6 years ago

Qt being C++ also makes creating language bindings often harder so not all languages will let you build a Qt interface. GTK is C so it's more straightforward.

Zardoz84• 6 years ago

Update you. Qt has been LGPL many years.

jamesgeck04• 6 years ago

Switching to Qt isn't automatically a slam dunk on Windows.

I can tell when an app uses Qt because it opens in a microscopic window on my Surface. VLC users have been waiting on a fix for Qt-related fractional DPI scaling issues on Windows for years.

joezydeco• 6 years ago

All Qt developers have. I wouldn’t put all the blame squarely on Qt. Windows high DPI support is just awful on top of Qt’s neglect.

Have you ever hooked a high-DPI laptop to a low-DPI second monitor? What a freaking headache that is.

Say what you want about MacBook owners being brand snobs, but they never have to deal with this nonsense.

jchw• 6 years ago

Huh? I know for a fact Qt 5 itself supports fractional scaling because it works on Linux and especially KDE.

I don’t get why things wouldn’t work?

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/highdpi.html

justinclift3• 6 years ago

Yeah..

Also, Dark Mode support on windows (and others) still doesn't work properly, though there are workarounds.

For Windows at least, the Dark Mode support in Qt seems to have someone now assigned to the task (last few days). So it might be better with the next major release.

dagmx• 6 years ago

The DPI Scaling may be down to using earlier versions of Qt or being misconfigured.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/highdpi.html

I've used Qt successfully here with different DPI, and it works well once configured for the most part. It's still not perfect on Windows, but it's a lot better than it used to be when set up properly.

FraKtus• 6 years ago

VLC does not look like using Qt, at least on macOS.

ssivark• 6 years ago

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!

nine_k2• 6 years ago

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

This is rather widely available.

RussianCow• 6 years ago

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.

organsnyder• 6 years ago

I bought my first music on Bandcamp a couple of days ago (they had a day when 100% of sales went to the artists). That seems like one of the best ways to support artists while still having a cloud-hosted library.

aasasd7• 6 years ago

If your library of favorites doesn't amount to a couple terabytes like in, ahem, some cases, then it's pretty easy to dump the selected bunch with `youtube-dl`.

Death of a couple sites with not-widely-available music, in the past few years, has distinctly shown which of those two terabytes should be more closely guarded. ‘It's all on the web‘, I've been told—well, not quite so anymore unless I upload it somewhere first.

asveikau2• 6 years ago

Last I checked audio on YouTube is very low bitrate and sounds a lot worse than what popular online mp3 stores will give you.

gilnaa• 6 years ago

Wow, Banshee. I liked it so much and no other player managed to replace it for me.

What a shame that it died.

rubyn00bie• 6 years ago

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?

paride5745• 6 years ago

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

cycloptic13• 6 years ago

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.

kitotik• 6 years ago

Curious, what would you choose?

For whatever reason, the cross-platform UI story seems dire as ever if you don’t count web.

gmueckl2• 6 years ago

Qt 5 is just the best in class for cross-platform GUI development. It's huge and slightly idiosyncratic in places, but developing cross platform UIs (and even lots of platform specific UI patterns) is pretty straightforward. The standard UI controls are very flexible and powerful. Bugs due to differences between platforms are really rare.

Other toolkits like wxWidgets are perfectly serviceable, but they are not nearly as complete.

kbumsik• 6 years ago

Because Qt has fantastic documentations and intuitive examples. Gtk is notorious for lacking proper documentations and unstable feature changes.

Here is a talk when Subsurface decided to go Qt from Gtk: https://youtu.be/ON0A1dsQOV0

puzzlingcaptcha2• 6 years ago

Audacious has been a loong-time GTK project (2005?) and at some point had a GTK3 port, which was then abandoned. The authors provide some explanation here: https://audacious-media-player.org/news/32-audacious-3-6-rel... & here https://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/boards/1/topics/1...

modzu• 6 years ago

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

aasasd7• 6 years ago

It's alive!

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

Paianni• 6 years ago

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.

betenoire• 6 years ago

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

DagAgren2• 6 years ago

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

simonh• 6 years ago

Good quality graphical apps sounds great, but do those exist for every single use case? Unfortunately not. It doesn’t matter how great the native graphical sketching apps on MacOS and Windows are, that isn’t going to help me when what I want to do is analyse packet captures. That’s when I reach for Wireshark, and do so full of appreciation to the devs for the excellent tool they have provided.

Would it be better us every platform I use it in had an equally high quality fully native port with full feature parity across platforms? Sure, but I also understand the huge extra commitment of resources that would require, so I’m content to let them choose the trade off that works for them.

toastercup2• 6 years ago

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) 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.

Arnavion• 6 years ago

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.

toastercup2• 6 years ago

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..

MavropaliasG• 6 years ago

Try clementine

justaj• 6 years ago

Have you tried DeaDBeeF Player? It was supposedly created as an alternative to Foobar2000

https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-Player/deadbeef

newscracker• 6 years ago

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.

nkkollaw• 6 years ago

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

They definitely prefer functionality over looks.

rudilee• 6 years ago

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.

strategarius• 6 years ago

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.

Audacious 4.0 released, switches from GTK to Qt 5

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