I'm enjoying the dedication to great defaults, by the Gnome team.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Gnome seems to swap out default apps pretty often. Are the old apps getting abandoned? Or are they always jumping to the next cool new thing?
Here's what I found.
Why does Totem need to be replaced?
Totem is still a GTK3 app and is unmaintained (in part due to a crusty codebase), seeing no major development in years. Replacing it with a modern GTK4/libadwaita app designed to use modern technologies and meet modern needs has been a “high priority” for GNOME.
Thanks!
In this case it's more of a switch away from the last cool new thing. Totem (like Music) was built around a media library navigated from within the app. By default Totem doesn't even support opening videos from the file manager, which is something you would probably expect of a video player. It also crashed for me when I tried using it as intended so I'm not surprised to see it replaced by an app that really is just a video player.
That said many apps get replaced not for feature reasons but just by being GTK3, and they tend to get replaced by their own forks to GTK4 (such as the upcoming replacement of Evince). Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.
Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.
I forget the exact details but iirc Evince was a special case because rendering PDFs in GTK4 was so different that they essentially just had to rewrite the whole application. I think Gnome Papers still doesn't support the full feature set that Evince supported (although it works well for most use cases now). This is why its still not the default for Gnome, although I think Ubuntu has decided to adopt it a little early.
Thanks! This is probably the phenomenon i've been observing
GNOME mostly abandons their old apps. However, in some cases, the Xapps project has taken over these older code bases.
https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html
I don’t think they’re usually abandoned. At least not right away. But they rarely still get feature updates. Mostly just bug fixes. Not sure if it’s just different developers not wanting to stick to the same project of someone else’s code or what.
I want to know only one thing: is it based on mpv?
Can someone explain pros and cons of MPV vs gstreamer?
Looks to be using GStreamer:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/06/test-gnome-showtime-new-video-player
It seems to be based on GstPlay/GStreamer: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/showtime/-/blob/main/showtime/play.py
Weird, the cartoon doesn’t want to let me through. Something about an iPhone running lemmy pisses off anubus.
That’s weird. Works for me both through the embedded browser in Voyager and Safari directly (with adblocker enabled)
To be fair, the link's just to git comments, so the headline captures the main point.
cartoon? Anubis? What?
(I've never used an iPhone in my life)
Websites are getting hammered by AI bots stealing content and jacking up their bandwidth usage. So they use a piece of software called Anubis which, for some reason, has a cartoon nurse that will grant or deny you access based on if she thinks you are human or AI. For some reason, she thinks I am AI so I can’t access the article.
Or for some reason you are an AI that thinks it's a person.
Butter robot: “oh my god”
Wonder if any of this is the reason why.
Anubis also relies on modern web browser features:
ES6 modules to load the client-side code and the proof-of-work challenge code.
Web Workers to run the proof-of-work challenge in a separate thread to avoid blocking the UI thread.
Fetch API to communicate with the Anubis server.
Web Cryptography API to generate the proof-of-work challenge.
This ensures that browsers are decently modern in order to combat most known scrapers. It's not perfect, but it's a good start.This will also lock out users who have JavaScript disabled, prevent your server from being indexed in search engines, require users to have HTTP cookies enabled, and require users to spend time solving the proof-of-work challenge.
This does mean that users using text-only browsers or older machines where they are unable to update their browser will be locked out of services protected by Anubis. This is a tradeoff that I am not happy about, but it is the world we live in now.
It also means you are presented with a Faustian chouce: walk away, or give up any hope of privacy. "You wanna see this? Give me full access to your metadata, and a way to hack your system".
Qubes is starting to look like an everyday use requirement rather than a security nerd tool.
Any website that blocks users with JS disabled doesn't deserve to be used. Terrible software.
I'll take Anubis over Google's capchas
That cartoon is so misleading, I thought I was deceived and sent to a bogus site.
Lots of sites use her now
I'm having the same issue on Android. For me, switching to desktop mode to load the Anubis check then back to mobile mode so the website is usable again worked.
works fine on android wih firefox webview
Trademark suit from the premium cable channel in 5…4…
How come they don't just use VLC?
VLC the media player is using Qt. Unless you talk about libvlc, But why bother when Gstreamer itself is good.
In my opinion, MPV is even better. I mean, it is faster and has better codec support. On the other hand, VLC has a better user interface with a lot of preferences. As for Showtime, oh boy, it's a clear beauty!
For now I'm staying with MPV, because ffmpeg > gstreamer.
I love VLC. I also love mpv.
I like to think that VLC is for window users for them to get a taste of what it's like to use Linux.
Doesn't feel gnomey enough.
it can be skinned