One question: why didn’t you choose Celluloid instead of Showtime?
Celluloid seems more like a Gnome app and is vastly superior.
I believe Showtime is the default on GNOME as of now
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The thing is, Showtime is very limited, as are the other GStreamer video players, so switching from Totem to Showtime is pretty much just a design change.
Celluloid uses MPV, as do Haruna and MPC-QT, and MPV alone is already vastly superior to Showtime.
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Honestly, when people talk about being forced to use Snap, it seems like a lot of drama to me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make such a fuss about being forced to use Flatpak, and I’m not even talking about Snap vs. Flatpak, but rather using Flatpak instead of native packages.
Flatpak has worse support for GTK themes, it even has problems with cursors, I installed Showtime Flatpak and the cursor becomes the Adwaita cursor but giant, Flatpak doesn’t have the QT Oxygen style, the freedesktop runtime probably didn’t even need to exist, and so far I haven’t seen anything about Flatpak supporting LXQT.
But even with all these problems, Flatpak is often treated as if it were something incredible, the solution to everything, something that all distros should use by default.
In fact, Steam Flatpak can’t even create .desktop shortcuts and icons in the right places. And if it could, it would still need to change each .desktop created to replace the “steam” command with the “flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam” command.
Even publishing something on Flathub is bad. I published only a few gtk3 themes in Flatpak and had to publish each variation separately, and the flathub.org website gives me no control over the Flatpaks I published.
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Just to be clear I’m not saying Showtime is great, just that they decided to bundle it because GNOME did too. I never use the built-in video player with my operating systems and swap it for either VLC or MPV with a config I like
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ffmpegthumbnailer is a great alternative.
A version that can generate thumbnails for audio files as well was released today.
Posts moved from the following discussion because they are off-topic.
Yep, there is also new rust-based project to provide thumbnails for audio/video files on GNOME as Totem replacement:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/gst-thumbnailers-1.0-alpha
I agree on the Snap part. One could also say that Fedora, Elementary OS, Mint, Debian etc. force Flatpak upon it’s users ever since they integrated it on their distributions. But you hear no one complain about that. Same as with the Wayland only move, why the drama? Fedora has been using Wayland as default since their Fedora 25 release and someone has to take the lead so others can follow.
Every move Ubuntu makes results in drama and gets negative press. Most of the people on the web are just following the naysayers without even having trying it themselves or even run a totally different distro.
In general the Linux communities aren’t what it used to be, there’s way too much toxicity and drama going on which, for me at least, takes away the fun. I really wish i could turn back the clock 18 to 19 years ago when i started to make my way to the Linux world, the communities were totally different back then, vibrant, kind, full of activity, energy and ideas. But that declined and faded away.
If we want Linux to work we need to:
Work together, stay constructive, play it nice, don’t judge someone on which distro they use nor burn it to the ground. Stay open, kind, helpful and respectful.
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They could say that, but for the most part, they would be wrong. With the exception of ElementaryOS, none of those distros preinstall flatpak apps.
- Fedora has plans to, but even if they do, the rpm versions of those apps will remain in the repos. And this controversial even for Fedora because most people do not like that they use their own Flatpak repo, Fedora Flatpaks.
- Linux Mint comes with flatpak and Flathub, but it is a lower priority than their repo packages. Flatpaks are an “extra”.
- I’m 95% sure Debian does not come with flatpak preinstalled.
The big thing that Ubuntu does differently from those 3 distros is that Ubuntu completely replaces some deb packages with snap packages. You can no longer install Firefox, Chromium, etc from Canonical as debs, you must use the snap or third party builds.
I don’t hate the idea of snap, I even maintain a snap on the store, but the execution hasn’t been great. It took a really long time for Canonical to solve the startup speed issue, it plagued snap for years and it certainly didn’t help that you couldn’t always fall back onto the better working deb version. It sometimes feels like Canonical has a “move fast and break things” mentality when it comes to snap, like when they made the calculator app a snap many years ago (slow startup issues), with Firefox in 2022 (slow startup, missing functionality), and Steam (promoted to stable branch despite having many known issues with games). And in general, Canonical has fixed these issues. But only after uses experienced them and had bad first impressions.
It doesn’t help that snap is a more “corporate” feeling than flatpak. The most notable thing being that snap only supports one store, the Canonical store and is tailored towards Ubuntu (given that the sandboxing is very weak on non-AppArmor distros).
That all being said, I want snap to succeed. I like sandboxed apps and snap on the surface is a lot more powerful than flatpak. I just wish Canonical fixed its paper cuts, took things more slowly, and would give users more control.
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It might just be my experience, but Celluloid doesn’t work correctly for me on Ubuntu. I think Showtime is fine as a default option. Regardless, in the minimal installation, no video player comes pre-installed. I’m still using Totem because the frame-capture feature doesn’t work well yet in Showtime 49.0. In Ubuntu 26.04, this feature actually works.