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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Their maintained fork of Amarok 1.x really makes it worthwhile for me.

Also, dcop is probably the best GUI automation tool I’ve used.

Amarok was the first app in Linux that was better than the Windows counterpart. My non-technical friends would ask how could they use it. It was the killer app for the Linux Desktop at the time.

> Also, dcop is probably the best GUI automation tool I’ve used.

Everytime I have to use dbus from the CLI I think to myself, dcop died for this?!

To me the best GUI automation tool (in Linux at least) was Kommander, another KDE app that didn't survived the KDE3-4 transition. A pretty decent 'low-code' tool that unfortunately didn't make it to KDE4.

I used KDE4 up to 4.2, when it supposedly 'got good'. It wasn't bad by any means. But KDE3 was better.

The first few years after KDE4 came out I spent a lot of time on getting Amarok to work on my system. Such an amazing music player. It got harder, and eventually I switched to spotify too. (And even though you have nearly every piece of music at your fingertips, it still pales in comparison to what you could do with Amarok)

Re: Amarok

Have you tried Clementine or Strawberry Player(s)?

Oh wow. After the Amarok team dropped v1 for v2, I continued to compile v1 for years on any distro I installed. Eventually that became extremely tedious. I tried a few remakes (Clementine, Strawberry etc) but none of them kept the column view on the left sidebar! The tree layout sucked!

Unfortunately I discover this a little late because MusicBee now works flawlessly in Wine (with some small tricks) and absolutely blows Amarok v1 away. A few years ago I downloaded an ancient archive of Ubuntu (8.04?) and turned it into a docker image, found a still-online deb repo, installed as many development packages I could find, and managed to compile a static Amarok 1.4. I got it running on my desktop! But it was a disappointment - I remembered it being waaay better than this. I'm pretty sure I had a patch I made to tweak how the left sidebar worked in columns mode too.,

I once wrote an entire application around dcop. Actually it was a tool for plotting your amarok songs on a 2D kde window grid and it allowed you to make little gestures and squiggles to determine what songs amarok would play. It was a pretty fun project.

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