Could you change the media cache location in a future release please? I notice that album art is already cached under ~/.cache/plexamp & it bothers my OCD that the music files are cached in the top-level home directory, Library. There’s also a spec for this kinda stuff. 
Make a symlink? That would avoid us having to do migrations…
That would be beside the point. I don’t see anything of importance to migrate here - my last tidal playlist or album? Though I don’t know what else you may use this folder for. If you also use it for downloads or something then fine, but Tidal streams should be cached elsewhere & carry little value regards migration.
May I recommend moving to the Flatpak instead? Flatpak automatically keeps the cache files in the correct location, and is significantly more reliable than the AppImage is.
We’re likely to stop shipping the appimage at some point in the not-too-distant future due to the wealth of issues we’ve seen with that packaging format.
That’s a fair response. Disappointing, but fair.
I understand how packaging as an AppImage could be more involved than Flatpak. Also, people who don’t know how to create a .desktop file or know the most basic of terminal commands will likely find something to complain about. Without going on a package format rant, I’ll concentrate on what’s wholly relevant with regards to Plexamp - dependencies. I followed your your suggestion to try it out and this was my experience:
flatpak install com.plexamp.Plexamp
Looking for matches…
Required runtime for com.plexamp.Plexamp/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]:
com.plexamp.Plexamp permissions:
ipc network pulseaudio x11
dri dbus access [1] bus ownership [2]
[1] org.freedesktop.Notifications
[2] org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Plexamp
ID Branch Op Remote Download
1. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 23.08 i flathub 164.3 MB / 164.6 MB
2. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 23.08-extra i flathub 18.5 MB / 164.6 MB
3. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-550-67 1.4 i flathub 307.6 MB / 307.7 MB
4. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale 23.08 i flathub 17.9 kB / 360.1 MB
5. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264 2.2.0 i flathub 886.7 kB / 944.3 kB
6. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform 23.08 i flathub 177.5 MB / 227.6 MB
7. [✓] com.plexamp.Plexamp stable i flathub 108.6 MB / 112.1 MB
Installation complete.
That’s 780MB over 7 different packages just for Plexamp, which is also available as a 107MB self-contained & fully portable AppImage. 
That’s not entirely a fair comparison. The appimage isn’t as self-contained as you might think, as it depends on effectively the same resources, but provided by system packages. This results in inconsistent experiences between distros (and distro releases), and can make supporting older OSes in particular (see e.g. Ubuntu LTSes) very difficult, or even impossible without building multiple package variants.
On the other hand, those Flatpak dependencies are deduplicated and shared between all Flatpak packages you have installed. Updates to these are delivered as deltas, so actual download sizes tend to be very small.
Disk space is cheap these days. To me, the tradeoff of Flatpak’s stability, atomicity and reproducibility vs a little more disk space consumption is absolutely worth it.
1 Like
How about open-sourcing Plexamp and leaving packaging to distro maintainers to worry about? You can still maintain propriety server side components which enable you to monetise the app - your servers, your business, after all…
Sorry if my tone is a little critical. I just want Plexamp to be great as it has so much potential. However, using it 100% with Tidal, I often feel like a beta tester when I use it, so run away and use BubbleUPnP with upmpdcli & mpd for a while.
Even if that were something I could do, I don’t think that it’s necessarily a solution, either. Distro maintainers have enough work on their hands that plenty of brokenness slips through the cracks of that model.
The number of packages I’ve come across that’ve remained broken in popular distros for years because the maintainers don’t have time or resources to fix them, and the app or library developers remain frustrated because they receive the reports upstream but have no control of downstream.
The existing Linux app distribution model is very broken, and that’s what Flatpak is here to solve. In a flatpak world, distro maintainers look after their distro’s core packages, and end-user apps are owned by their developers and shipped directly to users.
1 Like
I fear we’ve gone well off track from my simple request now. I can’t reply without starting a rant at this point. I’ll just accept that our views on flatpak & appimages differ.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
