Can't remove VLC

Support Software & Applications
22

By default, KDE recommends to use vlc backend with Plasma desktop, because that beast plays no matter what you throw at it from old and unknown media to newer ones, and it has a quite big users base around the world on multiple platforms (downloaded by 5 billion users including desktop and mobile)

Non-Plasma packages

  • phonon-vlc (this is the only maintained and supported Phonon backend for KDE apps that use Phonon for their multimedia needs; the alternative phonon-gstreamer has been unmaintained since 2013 and should not be shipped by default, or at all, ideally)
23

Statistics have to be taken with one grain of salt - or more than that.

There are ~ 8 Billion people alive today.
and more than half of those use vlc? :grimacing:

24

It’s the total number of downloads, which is different from the total number of users.
The same when you read that Chrome browser is downloaded on Google Play Store more than 10 billion.

25

To chime in to the tune, this sucks. Since when did VLC become an integral part of the plasma ecosystem? Not being able to remove an unneeded media player (!) is just preposterous.

26

Arch idea is to keep the minimum of changes to their packages, so instead of following vlc changes and split all its codecs and package them into separate libvlc, Arch maintainers simply push the whole thing to end users.

I think they have total right to do it, because Arch aren’t like Ubuntu or those six months release distributions who take their time to package and split various libraries, Arch is a fast rolling distro in which a package can have multiple updates in one or two days.

So any sudden change in vlc files will require a fast intervention, and this is not safe at all for Arch and not easy to track, because vlc is not the only package to keep an eye on it.

So having an extra few MB of space and an additional video player doesn’t hurt at all, because Plasma is needing all of its media libraries for various components, and you can hide vlc if you don’t use it.

2 Likes
27

Especially as disc store is incredibly cheap these days. Not like when I installed my first Linux system on a 4G HDD.

28

If the library packages had a ~50mb change (the size of vlc unpacked) then no one would bat an eye.
With this situation you get that plus a menu entry (and the associated program).
Sure, in my perfect world I dont have vlc because I use a different media player … but its really not worth bothering about.

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