foobar2000 on Wine, Wayland, and GNOME Equals Trouble.
foobar2000 is a popular Windows program for managing audio files.
It can play, organize, but also batch transcode just about anything to just about anything else. You can install the Free Encoder Pack, and if you want to use later binaries for the encoder, you can just grab the Windows x86-64 binary of the official encoder and stomp the .exe that came with foobar2000.
One thing I’ve never liked about Linux transcoding programs, is that while we do have them, authors of software like SoundConverter (which is meant for GNOME and uses GTK) tend to use things like GStreamer, which was not intended to encode and has a rather bogus Opus encoder of its own that I do not like. About the only reliable destination format in SoundConverter is MP3, which uses LAME.
But MP3 is an aging format. It doesn’t do well at 128k and lower VBR bitrates, and it will never do as well as Opus.
foobar2000 is one of the few Windows programs I haven’t given up.
But under GNOME and Wayland, it’s quite unpredictable.
Sometimes it starts up with a black screen and you have to shut down the program and know which database file got corrupt and delete it.
Sometimes you go to drag files from Nautilus (GNOME Files) into foobar2000, and it simply crashes foobar2000.
When I posted my criticisms of Wayland yesterday, I didn’t include this one, simply alluding to the fact that Wayland has problems even with GNOME.
This is one of them. When Wine runs, it runs on XWayland. Something about foobar2000 running on XWayland in GNOME causes these bugs. The author of foobar2000 doesn’t care what happens when you use Wine.
The GNOME, GTK, and Wayland people are all IBM Red Hat types who defame people who report bugs, threaten them with the CoC, and then accuse them of being on meth and cover up their own CoC violations with network bans.
So good luck getting help for this with anyone in that line of people.
But when you run foobar2000 on X11, it works. It doesn’t do this.
This is another case of Wayland causing problems with actual work where no problem actually existed before under X11. And I’m sure that I’m not the only person who ran into something like this, or the problems with Fallout 4.
There’s simply too many problems with Wayland and GNOME to cover up, so the developers resort to trolling and hate speech, and CoC threats against users and developers who come there wanting them to do stuff.
(As you can see, this behavior from Red Hat predates IBM and was toxic, completely unprofessional, and unacceptable even in 2015. If you’re not going to implement a feature, can you at least not attempt to rewrite history and come up with completely disingenuous lies?)
This is why GNOME, GTK, and Wayland should just die already. Die in a fire.
I’ve noticed an awful lot of cases with KDE on X11 in openSUSE Leap where I’m like “How did I tolerate Fedora, GNOME, Wayland, and the rest of this forever?”
I wouldn’t mind it if they would just say “You’re not paying us and this isn’t a problem for us, so we don’t care.” but they troll you. They make you feel guilty for even asking questions. They say things like “If you don’t like Fedora, just get a refund for the money you paid!”.
This is juvenile and it’s exactly the difficult personality types new users would run into 20 years ago and decide that maybe Linux just wasn’t for them.
It’s sad to see that this is a problem 20 years later, and the problem is mostly in GNOME, and distributions are even still shipping GNOME despite the toxicity from the developer side.
The Code of Conduct isn’t there to protect people from corporate hostility, gaslighting, hate speech, and troll squads. It’s there to muzzle people who came to make very reasonable requests.
X11 was pretty much defined, written, hashed out, and developed in the time before the Red Hat “Good Old Boys” club came about. It’s hard to hijack it, rewrite history, and flame people who use it.
Since I haven’t seen any indicators that Wine will work on Wayland natively soon, there’s nothing for me to even experiment with now.
Maybe that’s why it tends to work and “needs replaced”.
I’d say that a lot of the attitude of Red Hat just goes back to the roots of the company and hasn’t gotten any better or less toxic under IBM.
In fact, their refusal to prioritize the desktop experience was basically the only reason Mandrake Linux came about. They were ahead of their time in having a desktop-oriented Linux distribution that had an easy installer and a partitioning tool that made sense, and when you installed it you were greeted by help wizards and documentation and KDE at a time when Red Hat Linux was pretty rough stuff.
Now they admit that they’re not particularly worried about the Corporate Desktop anymore and don’t think that business software even matters.
They deleted their mailing list so that it’s not easy to track the orphaned Fedora packages anymore or watch discussions about it.
I’d say that you should use the time while Fedora is even supported at all to develop a migration strategy to something else. Like I did. ⬆