this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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What's wrong with that? If you think it's bloat, GNOME has tons of that and this is just a minor one. I wouldn't be surprised if Decibels integrated into Nautilus to play audio files directly in the file manager. Probably more beneficial for mobile than desktop though.
I agree with you, I just wanted to share this for the sake of completion.
I guess the author of the article has reacted too much. The audio player they mentioned is a music player. At this point a simple audio player suits GNOME more after all of those simplifications they made for core applications.
Isn't that what gnome-sushi is for?
Close, but sushi is for previews, though technically you can run the whole file as a preview I think.
The issue is not that it's bloat but that it makes a bad first impression, especially on new users. This is very much "batteries-not-included" software.
In the old days, before it bitrotted, Rhythmbox could do a lot. You could play an entire album or playlist, search, sort, sync your iPod, you could play and rip CDs -- and it was much quicker than iTunes nonetheless. Alternatively, you could use Totem for music and video and even that could do playlists. Modern Totem has some playlist functionality, but that functionality is so basic, it only works by opening multiple files at once from the file manager. Now Decibels basically does the same thing as modern Totem, except with a waveform background but not better in any other way.
Gnome Music still exists. This isn't a music player, it's an audio player.
While I wouldn't oppose the idea of a pre-installed music player, I believe Rhythmbox was never a core application. I hope they won't make a music player a core app because you cannot uninstall them because of dependencies. Also the first impression is the distro's concern not GNOME's. I support modularism instead of making softwares bundle in a bundle. For example, I should be able to use whatever file manager without worrying about the whole DE bloat. For GNOME, they are in too deep for dependencies, as for KDE.
I appreciate GNOME's work for simplicity, but I don't appreciate their dependency hell.
Rhythmbox was originally a GNOME 2 app that never fully made it into the GNOME 3 era. Otoh, "core apps" is a concept introduced some time after GNOME 3.0. That timeline can't match up.
The original GNOME 3/4 core music player was/is GNOME Music. Except GNOME Music was so reduced as to be barely useful, especially at the beginning. Creating an opening for e.g. Lollypop.
Before core apps were introduced thereight be distros that would randomly ship GNOME with VLC, FileZilla, and xterm. I.e. apps that don't integrate well with GNOME and are not regularly used by average users.
The idea behind core apps was trying to influence app selection on such distros. To make sure that all distros would ship with a default selection of useful, well-integrated apps. Iow, first impression is a major reason why core apps are even a thing.
I don't think I worried about "DE bloat" any time in the past ten years. Might be different if I was using Raspi desktop. :)
I know it's relatively a recent concept but they can always say "these are our apps and they are well integrated in our DE" instead of making them inseparable part of the DE. They probably want to reach a standard like MacOS, and that's not a bad thing but that restricts the developers.
I always preferred GTK over Qt and I still do, however I can understand the developers who want to use another framework.
While the intention is respectable, there are still Qt apps with no GTK equivalent or vice versa. If you need those, you still cannot go pure GTK or pure Qt. It's a dream.
Well, I'm a happy WM user since 2014 as well (GNOME 2.32 was my last favourite DE on my main machine) but I still have to install KDE or GNOME bloat. Only thing I can do about that is using flatpaks for those programs but I prefer package manager. Flatpaks are heavy, slow updating and use more space.