spotify-qt VS com.spotify.Client

If you want to run Spotify on a Raspberry (or PinePhone or some other device), there’s Spot, which is great, but kinda heavy and slow. There’s Spotify-qt which is faster, requires messing with Spotify developer dashboard, and UI doesn’t fit on small screens. Spotify-qt is itself based on Spotify-tui which runs in the terminal (pretty cool IMO). And a bare client/daemon is spotifyd. So you have quite a few choices there.

Would like to add that you can also use clients such as spotify-qt and Spotify TUI to control said "device". There's also Spot and psst that are standalone (librespot not required but no Connect functionality).

spotify-qt, https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt - in the repos

You could use an an unofficial client, for example: - Spot (GTK, can stream directly) - spotify-qt (QT, just a Spotify connect frontend, so you need something like spotifyd running) - spotify-tui (terminal, again just a Spotify connect frontend) - spotifyd (daemon that is controlled via Spotify connect)

IIRC, Spotify requires that you be a premium user to have API access to be able to use unofficial native clients like this one, and Discord will straight up ban your account if you try to use a third party client too much. BetterDiscord is a mod for the first-party client, so it behaves similarly enough that it's difficult for them to detect it. But it happened to a friend of mine that was using the WeeChat plugin while it was still being developed. There's plenty of other instances of similar situations with other services.

> Spotify is a big ask because google would have to port widevine (the web DRM.)

Spotify shouldn't be a problem [0][1] using librespot [2]. As for banking, I can't speak for all of Europe, but web apps are generally optimized for desktop use, apps have some convinient features, like scanning the QR code of a bill and pay it with one tap, instead of having to type in everything manually when it's on paper, or copy paste it from a PDF.

Additionally some banks require an app for 2FA for the web interface on PC too.

[0] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt

There is nothing "unsafe" about flatpak. In fact for every package on flathub you can see exactly what the "unofficial" packagers do in the corresponding github repository. For example here is the repository for Spotify, if you look at the json manifest file you can see they are repackaging the "official" Snap with the necessary libraries and scripts to support it running as a flatpak. Everything there is open source and able to be examined.

If you click on the "Manifest" link for the package on flathub, it will take you to where the code that packages the app resides. There you can review exactly what the packager does in the json manifest. Here's the one for the Spotify client, for example, which shows where it pulls in dependencies and where it downloads the proprietary code from (in this case they base it on the snap) and what commands it executes while packaging the flatpak.

Try installing it via Flatpak

Flatpaks builds are made to be reproducible. Everything is done openly and you can check how the apps like for example Spotify where made.

Why not just use the flatpak?

Judging by the manifest, the Spotify Flatpak is built from the Spotify Snap.