Yup that’s why I liked it. I of course use Firefox with all the extensions too on the steamdeck as the other person mentioned, but it’s just not as nice using a controller to browse sites as easily. You should check it out, you can even cast to it like a TV. VaccumTube works fine, see my edit. Just pray your account isn’t a part of that experiment that encrypts all the video streams. Seems YT is trying to get really strict with adblockers.
Oh no that works too. That’s what I am using now and was using beforehand, but VaccumTube was nice because it had more controller friendly UI/Controls for the SteamDeck. Using a controller as a mouse cursor kinda sucks. Plus you could dock your steamdeck and cast from your phone. It was nice.
Youtube artificially slows down the loading of videos on browsers like Firefox and especially for Ublock Origin users. I even get a little message saying “Experiencing issues? Find out why” and loading anything on the site takes longer. I even tested this theory by putting it in a fake virtual credit card and getting a free YT Premium trial. Magically the website is worked just fine on Firefox and the message no longer appeared… I refuse to pay Google though.
It turns out my account was a part of some A/B testing “experiment” that makes ALL YouTube videos encrypted, so third party apps don’t work. It wasn’t VaccumTubes fault. The only way I could get around it was by switching accounts. It makes me worried that YouTube will go through with this “experiment” and screw over many other programs like the suggested FreeTube in the near future. They already use this encryption on the TV and Movies you can “watch free with ads” on YouTube. I guess YT wants to use it for normal videos too. Yikes.
I wish they made something for Linux. I just used something called “VacuumTube” so I can use it on my steam deck, but literally just today I’m locked out of using it now. It says some error about “the video file is encrypted and can’t be played, try logging out” and now it doesn’t work on my main YT account. Ugh …
Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, is related to Jensen Huang; they are first cousins once removed. Hopefully she doesn’t closely follow Jensen’s beliefs, I just thought it was something worth mentioning.
I was just about to ask how the hell anyone remembers or knows all these commands, thanks for the info! I am trying to learn Linux and get used to using the Terminal more often.
I can’t speak for other programs, but for example, Photoshop runs under wine mostly. The issue is certain features like the content aware tool are locked behind the stupid Adobe Creative Cloud BS and is reported to have issues depending on which version you’re using and what tools you care about. IIRC, it’s mostly the newer AI tools that are affected so maybe linux users won’t care as much, but its still a downside worth noting nonetheless.
Most of the time when Adobe products are mentioned in this context, people will instead offer alternatives rather than telling you to run it under wine. It really depends on what programs professionals are using at their jobs though, and I imagine most will just use Windows on a separate work computer and not deal with the random issues with compatibility and troubleshooting. I think most wouldn’t want to risk losing important work related projects either. If its something more simple like Microsoft Word then you could probably get away with using it on linux though.
Yeah that’s true, I definitely don’t think it would be the end of blocking ads on YT or anything crazy. Tbf I was just making the assumption that it would be pretty hard to decrypt the video streams if YT could just keep changing the decryption key every so often. Had no idea there were workarounds tho, thanks for the info at least!
I shouldn’t really be using YT with an account anyways, it’s terrible for privacy/security to be using Google products in general. I’m gradually trying to break out of bad habits one service at a time. I just need to copy over all my playlists so I can start my little migration to FreeTube or something better.