Default applications review for 22.10 / 23.04 and beyond

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41

Video players is an interesting conundrum - some are feature pack, some are “light weight” but are divorce of deemed useful stuff.

Celluloid formerly gnome-mpv is our current video player. In the next release “1.0” it will be a libadwaita app.

XFCE ships parole - very lightweight in the same category as celluloid arguable.

GNOME Totem is a libhandy based app - more feature packed than most.

Then there are the Qt based apps like VLC and the rather garish looking smplayer.

Totem and Parole are my first thoughts - there is a route map for GTK4 version of Totem but seems to be blocked by quite a few things. So maybe swap to Totem for the foreseeable future but may need to reconsider

42

We use current gThumb as our image viewer - and it doubles as our photoviewer as well.

Now I know there are dedicated apps for both - eog (Eye of GNOME) and GNOME Photos are fantastic apps by themselves we decided a few years back to ship the one app that has simple but effective capabilities.

In terms of review - gThumb is part of the GTK4 porting initiative but little appears to have been done to-date. It is well maintained - issues seems to be fairly large but looks like being well managed. Debian packaging nothing to worry about here.

If there are better apps available I’m all ears - but for the moment my suggestion here to keep gThumb as the default for Ubuntu Budgie.

43

GNOME Logs is a graphical app allowing everyone to view various logs that the system produces.

Obviously all logs can be viewed via command line entries. From an ease of use GNOME Logs is a good app to have a default with.

GNOME Logs will be a libadwaita app in the future. There doesn’t seem to be any real alternatives in the archive. So its a question of “drop” or “keep”. I would dare to suggest keep this libadwaita app.

44

SMPlayer is the best video player on Linux in my 15 years experience of playing videos. Much better than VLC.
But it looks ugly as hell by default, indeed.
Once you apply a theme (I use Fusion style with Papirus icons), I think it doesn’t stand out in a way that is annoying as an app among the GTK apps.
But to make i default would be a stretch. It’s not bloated like VLC but it’s a bit too much for an entry point.

On the other hand, for me Celluloid and Totem are not even good enough to play a video (most videos have subtitles, but they don’t handle them “properly”).

I’m not sure if people still use video players as much in 2022 as between say 2005-2015. Maybe for a video of their cats rather than for a ripped show or movie (it’s all Youtube and Netflix/Prime/Hulu/Disney these days).
Just stick with either Totem or parole (although I don’t know that one) and people can still download VLC or SMPlayer if they want something more powerful.

45

Regarding the image viewer. I personally have no better suggestion. A while back, I was pissed by eog (which is utter crap), and had a wide look at those image viewers.

And I ended up… with gthumb, which is the better mix in my opinion as well. Let’s cross fingers they take their time to port it.

There’s also Shotwell, but just for viewing and cropping and rotating an image, it’s a bit too much.

46

GNOME Disks aka gnome-disk-utility displays and manages disk volumes. It can also create ISO files and restore ISO files to USB sticks etc.

It is a libhandy based app. At the moment there are no issues raised upstream related to GTK-4 and/or libadwaita.

If there are any other apps that could in the future be a ready alternative please shout - but for the moment I’m content for this app to continue being a default app for UB.

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47

Rhythmbox with the Alternative Toolbar (created by me!) has been a staple of our distro for a very long time. It is maintained as a package by Canonical and is in the main repo.

There are no plans for Rhythmbox that I have found that state a GTK4 uplift.

Development is painfully slow.

So is there an alternative good looking music player that is well maintained in the repo?

That’s an open question to you all.

I’m currently thinking about swapping to lollypop - it is actively packaged by Debian. Development is on-going with regular minor point releases every few months. It is a good looking player - with development under the GNOME umbrella Releases · World / lollypop · GitLab

48

Hi,
The problem with lollypop is that it don’t support anymore web radios anymore.
As this support has been removed, I have to move to an other music player

49

thats a shame. However there are dedicated apps - have you tried “goodvibes” available in the repo ?

50

Similarly - we should consider a good podcast app such a gpodder. Think this will cover the key sound features with a much better interface more orientated towards those sound mediums

51

I would really hate to see Evince go as, being a consumer of lots of .PDFs, I occasionally have a need to annotate their contents (highlight text and add notes) and Evince provides this functionality very nicely implemented. Hopefully Atril has similar functionality?

52

Well, nothing prevents you from using it.
If I’m not mistaken, the discussion here is not to remove it from the repos.

Rather just to change which one should should be default (for an install image).

53

Understood. Default installed is always better when ya can get it though. :wink:

54

If it weren’t for stand-alone video players (I typically use VLC), I’d be up a creek as most internet players don’t provide any ability to significantly raise the volume high enough for we members of the all-but-deaf club. I often use VLC to play the videos directly from BitChute and on sites where that’s not possible, I download them first and then play them. Granted, I’m just one vote.

55

Regarding the default games.
I found 2 interesting ones … both are one the repo, updated on the debian repos and Qt based. Need some suggestions.

Cute Maze: Ubuntu – Details of package cutemaze in jammy

Connectgram: Ubuntu – Details of package connectagram in jammy
Also requires a data package: Ubuntu – Details of package connectagram-data in jammy

56

All. FYI I have now a PPA beginning to test out the 22.10 application switch …

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/switch
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt autoremove

running sudo apt autoremove cleans up apps we are moving away from.

Need to test out any theming issues and the defaults when double clicking files on nemo should open in the new apps.

Do help please.

57

Now included in the switch is the removal of gnome-screenshot and inclusion of our new budgie-screenshot. This definitely needs a wider audience so please give it a try.

EDIT:

I’ve also added in a proposal for the budgie desktop settings - style tab to set the preferred dark/light GNOME application value - this is for libadwaita and libhandy based apps. Let me know your thoughts.

58

I’m no longer convinced GNOME Videos aka Totem is the best fit. There seems to be tearing visible when playing full screen and it unfortunately requires GNOME Tracker.

I have looked at the following additional players:

mplayer-gui - the interface is not obvious laid out and I couldn’t get a video to play out of the box
deepin-movie - Qt based app. Theming will be an issue but does play well.
xine-ui - the interface is questionable
gmerlin - the interface is not obvious and kept crashing

For the moment I’m going to suggest Parole as a replacement for Celluloid

60

gnome-characters is now a libadwaita based app.

The nearest GTK equivalent is probably gucharmap (formally known as gnome characters) which on its gitlab project says it is in deep-freeze maintainence mode only.

Unless anyone knows anything different, suggest we leave gnome-characters as a default app.