This will be the year of Linux… I mean, VLC 4.0. And a thought about Kodi. A post with a musical point

At the end of one year or the beginning of another, there is always an article or news that states that "this will be the year of Linux." They refer to the desktop, and some expert or just software fan says that Linux users will rise and will increase by a lot the 2% market share that it has had for a long time. It is something that never happens, and in the same way, year after year it is also said that the stable version of VLC 4.0… and neither.

VLC 4.0 was introduced at the beginning of 2019 as a breakthrough that would mainly be noticeable in its user interface. It will look more like what we see on mobile devices, and its music library will invite us to listen to more music in the famous cone player. Already in 2021, more than two years after that presentation, was when it started with the year of the groundhog, with the speculations, to affirm that VLC 4.0 will arrive this year, and already 4 years have passed A) Yes.

ChatGPT says that VLC 4.0 will arrive "this 2021"

With the fame he has gained, it is not surprising that we return to mentioning Chat GPT in an article like this. It is that for some things it is better than the almighty Google, and it has given me to ask him (via YouChat, that the servers do not crash so much) when will VLC 4.0 arrive. This artificial intelligence mainly pulls from two sources of information: one from search engines, and another from its training, which goes up to 2021. Therefore, from your response we can draw a conclusion: you do not have updated news about its launch, and in its database stated that the fourth major version of the VideoLan player would arrive in 2021.

Sometimes I want to remind him that we are in 2023, but why, he is not a human, no matter how much he sometimes seems so, and he ends up telling me something like he knows, but that his information goes up to 2021 and for him 2023 it is the future".

And the truth is that VLC 4.0 Looks very good. They have had their ups and downs, with moments in which two windows were opened to play a video, but all of this is solved over time. Right now, the player has everything from the current stable version, plus the interface and other improvements such as support to discover the devices that we have connected to the same network in a simpler and more direct way.

VLC 3.x consumes less resources than other players

The current VLC 3.0.x consumes less resources than other players. For example, I have taken to looking at how much Elisa (from KDE), Kodi and VLC 3.0.18 consume. While Elisa is close to 300mb, VLC consumes only about 80mb, while Kodi consumes a paltry mega... well, its interface. It surprised me so much that I had to look more, in the open processes section, to remember that the real executable, the bulk of the program, is kept by kodi.bin, and it consumes just over 400mb, around 150% of Elisa and 500% of VLC.

But that in v3.x. V4.0 is still in development, and sometimes it has a hard time even building the library, especially if we have dozens of complete discographies. Without a doubt, it is something that they will improve over time, and it is probably one of the reasons why it is taking so long: they want everything to be perfect and not lose the fame they have earned for so long and with so much effort.

NOTE: : At this resource point I've added what I've seen on two laptops, and we already know that on Linux, what works one way on one machine can work very differently on another.

And about Kodi's music interface

has recently been launched Kodi 20.0 Nexus, with many important changes. Among them, the best thing for Linux users is that there are addon developers who have seized the moment to update their plugins and they are working on Linux again, so now, and hopefully for a long time, Kodi returns to being what it had always been.

By using it more these days, it has given me to look at his musical section, and I think it could improve. It's just now when you have to talk about these things, when a major update has just been released and you start thinking about the next one. A long time ago one was used skin or theme, that of XBMC, and in 2016, with Kodi 17, Estuary was used, an interface that looks good no matter how we use it on the device we use it on, and it is greatly appreciated when we enjoy it on a large screen.

But Estuary is more thought for videos or lists. On the main screen is the library (whose information appears after choosing the source), and from there we can play the movies we have, but it's not exactly the same when we want to listen to music, where I think it could be improved by at least two points:

• The typical view of artists that is left to the side and that shows more when selecting one, just as seen in the header screenshot, would not be bad.
• When entering play mode, it shows the disc art and controls for a few seconds, but then it shows this:

As an example of how things can be done better, we will put the Radio addon, available in the official Kodi repositories. When the information is there, it's the same as when we play music, but when the OSD is gone, the logo of the addon appears in motion, something like this (with the OSD included):

Little things, but it would look better

Yes, it's true, they're just aesthetic things and everything works, but something could be done that does not go through installing plugins like these. For example, as many other players do, that blue is rather the album cover or an image generated with its colors. Or that in the section of the list, where the cover does appear on the left, the controls are also seen. It is what someone who listens to a lot of music would like, and although I know that it is not a priority for their development team, I also know that there are many times that a blogger says what they would like to see in an operating system or other software. and they end up ignoring him.

In the meantime, we're going to continue to think that this is the year that VLC 4.0 will be released. The music thing in Kodi will have to wait, at least, until its v21.