Basically, my entire system is FOSS but I’m tempted to install the Spotify .deb package. Would that give Spotify access to info about my system?
Thanks, I think psst will be it
Thank you!
Either use flatpak or the web app I guess?
Standard Debian packages have access to things like your home folder and other things that can be accessed without superuser level access. If you’re not okay with that, don’t install it.
If a flatpak package is available, it can have it’s permissions controlled by Flatseal, allowing you to restrict Spotify’s permissions.
Just use Spotifys web interface.
Everyone hates snaps but a sandboxed snap also exists in addition to a flatpak.
I am mostly saying this simply to annoy people.
Why not just use the web app?
The web app is (deliberately) limited in comparison to the desktop app.
The only limitation I’ve seen is the inability to download for offline listening. Other than that, especially on Brave, I get fully ad-free listening without any issues aside from a couple seconds of pause in between where the ad breaks used to be.
Ah, well I wasn’t able to add to a group playlist in the web app.
Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought, idk.
Group playlist? I’ve never used that feature, but I know you can add things to playlists on the web version, and you can make those playlists public as far as I know.
Yeah, well it said I had to download the app in order to do that. It was the first time I’ve used Spotify in years, though, so maybe there’s a workaround or something.
I’m sure Spotify collects data on the running system, similar to the Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
They use that data to make decisions about how to develop their product. Does that make it unsafe to you?
buy your music
You can run it in a vm 🤷♀️
Ordinarily I’d recommend the Flatpak, but the Flatpak for Spotify literally just a wrapper around the snap package. That’s nasty.
you could use yt-dlp
You could always user spotify-player! https://terminaltrove.com/spotify-player/
On Linux, all unsandboxed apps are allowed to do anything your user account can do (without sudo) - there is no permission model. You could use Flatpaks but they’re not perfect, likely would require customizing with Flatseal.
*without SELinux
But it’s a pain to set up and I hate it
So that’s like, reading all documents, writing stuff, and I assume it can also make outbound connections to servers?
Yep. Anything you could do on the terminal without typing a password.
Not answering your question directly but have you heard of Nuclear Music Player? It searches the Spotify API for track names and plays them from Youtube.
Exactly the type of answer I came looking for. beCause to Hell with proprietary drek. Happy to see other alternatives.
Just use it as a PWA from a Chromium browser. I run Spotify as a PWA in Brave and get free, ad-free music. It’s the ideal way, IMO. Then again, I only use Spotify for discovery. I buy my CDs and Bandcamp albums, I will always prefer ownership over streaming.
