COllaborative DEcision MAking (codema.in)

FreeTube display issues with flatpak (might be GTK4 dropping GLES 2 support)

Pirate Praveen Thu 15 May 2025 8:22AMPublicSeen by 8

FreeTube works well on FLX1 but broken on Librem 5. More details in https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/librem5-support/-/issues/11

I think a native youtube app is an important part of being able to daily drive gnu/linux on mobile. Android has NewPipe and PipePipe which works well. Being able to play audio only makes it a music player for many.

This would likely need adding missing GLES 3 features to mesa etnaviv driver.

Update: This looks like an upstream bug with the flatpak build https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/issues/5919

Or it might actually be GTK4 issue if flatpak has switched to newer GTK

GuidoThu 15 May 2025 9:05AM

I think you're mostly asking for "Please support GLES3 on the Librem 5" which is something Purism should help to support not primarily the community as without it the device becomes pretty unusable soon.

EDIT: This is becoming more and more a "let's keep the Librem 5 alive" tracker which is fine in the first place but shouldn't that then be written on the tin (rather than branding it a s Mobian / Debian / Phosh ) ?

GuidoThu 15 May 2025 10:04AM

(and FLX1 being more powerful, I don't see as many issues with it)

It's not about the FLX1 being more powerful here it is about the FLX1 using proprietary GL drivers. To me this is a huge difference, especially when you talk about Free Software in the next sentence.

Isn't it natural for community to step in when Purism is not doing it/taking a long time? Isn't that the whole spirit of Free Software?

My understanding is that this project here is primarily about raising funding and I think Purism should be part of this when it would benefit largely from the efforts. They're marketing their devices at a premium price because the say this helps software development so I think they should be involved in supporting their hardware. (I'm of course not telling where people should spend their money, I'm still trying to figure out what dephcom is about)