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Comment by popey | Hacker News Reader

While this may be tough on the 200 employees who have been let go, (selfishly) I hope one of them isn't the guy who maintains the Linux desktop client. :S

It was always a labo(u)r of love, and never seemed to have widespread support, due to the tiny userbase.

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I always assumed the desktop client was built using Electron or something similar, so would be the same for Windows/Linux/macOS, is this not the case?

The Spotify desktop client is based on Chromium Embedded Framework aka CEF (https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/src/master/), which while awfully similar to Electron, is definitely not Electron.

98% of the time I prefer YouTube (With AdBlock on of course). YouTube in most cases has the actual music videos, and a lot more adventurous (video) content because they can host remixes, which are so much more entertaining than just a bunch of album covers. Spotify also does nothing to promote and pay independent artists, they actually charge most independent musicians (even the ones not making profit) to be displayed on their platform rather than paying royalties, which is a pretty much giant ponzi scheme. YouTube does not pay greatly either in most cases, but it will occasionally promote artists better, and it allows content to be shared on other sites far beyond Spotify's controlling and restrictive attitude towards music content (they don't even really own nor make) hosted on their platform.

Spotify's UI is wonky and lacks visual appeal at most times for me. Having to frequently go back to the app to control or change what is playing is quite annoying, it really only needs to be a small scale floating window, as music player tech really hasn't changed dramatically since winamp. Spotify is not a revolutionary company at all, even Soundcloud (still not great to independent musicians either) has had a more visually appealing layout that values artists and the music content more than Spotify, and they've been that way for decades now.

Did you reply to the wrong person? Or was there an edit? What's the context for this...

> Spotify also does nothing to promote and pay independent artists, they actually charge most independent musicians (even the ones not making profit) to be displayed on their platform rather than paying royalties, which is a pretty much giant ponzi scheme.

This is false.

Can I ask why? Last time I used it, I didn't see any difference compared to the web version. Modern browsers can be controlled through MPRIS (playerctl or the bult-in client if you're using a full DE) and don't waste an additional couple of gigabytes of RAM to play a single audio stream.

I can alt-tab my windows, I can find tabs much more easily. Plus, I just prefer desktop apps.

It's sad that desktop apps are so bad nowadays that we prefer the browser. I guess that's what happens when desktop apps are just packaged web apps.

Sure, if it were a real desktop application, but it's just the same web UI repackaged into a separate copy of Chromium.

I haven't used the Linux client in years, so I don't know if it's on par with Windows/macOS versions, but I imagine the biggest selling point is downloading your playlists/library for offline listening. Plus, IIRC, the web version (and third-party clients) don't allow listening to the highest quality versions.

I'm on mobile, so I can't check.

> It was always a labo(u)r of love, and never seemed to have widespread support, due to the tiny userbase.

Did Spotify spend time on that?

I actually thought they supported it officially. Seems like it's made by their engineers in their spare time though:

"Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support." [1]

[1] https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/

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