Hello based people of lemmy,

I have recently started trying out BSDs as an alternative to Linux and found out that Spotify isn’t supported. Before you say try it in a browser this doesn’t work as spotify has DRM that doesn’t work on BSD OSes.

Now is there a way to stream music similar to Spotify? I know there is a downloader program available.

Furthermore do you know what self-hosted options are available? I already have a basic *arr stack and am always up for convoluted server and Linux hijinks.

  • amigan
    AEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    “BSDs” are not a monolith. You should actually specify what the hell it is you are talking about. Spotify runs just fine under the Linux ABI on FreeBSD.

    • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Hi, I am currently on GhostBSD but that could change so I didn’t want to be too specific in the post. I have tried installing spotify the way you suggest and it just crashes before I can get to a login screen. Do you think there is a way to make it work?

      • amigan
        AEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I do not use GhostBSD and am not familiar with it. It can be done on vanilla FreeBSD, you need to bootstrap an Ubuntu base system which is somewhat involved since there is not a package for it. Google is your friend.

        • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Oh and GhostBSD uses FreeBSD packages essentially. It’s like how Endeavour OS is to Arch linux of that makes sense.

          • amigan
            AEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            I am sure they have muddied the waters with some garbage “user-friendly” configuration.

            • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeOPEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              Honestly I haven’t found them to do anything daft yet. From my understanding FreeBSD is a pain to configure for desktop usage as it’s designed more for servers. Tell me if I am wrong.

              • amigan
                AEnglish
                1·
                5 months ago

                Yes, you are wrong. FreeBSD is a general purpose operating system. You install what you need and configure what you need. GhostBSD and its ilk are for weenies.

                  • amigan
                    AEnglish
                    1·
                    5 months ago

                    I use Arch too. I’ve been using FreeBSD for 21 years, though. I run everything on it, even this Lemmy instance.

        • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          I already have an Ubuntu system bootstrapped. It doesn’t work. I think I messed it up somehow. Do you have a specific guide?

            • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeOPEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              Those steps are outdated. I specifically had to lookup spotify’s directions for installing on Ubuntu as the public key has changed I think. It’s also just sort of freezes, it doesn’t close or anything. There is a message about the GPU drivers I don’t really understand and probably can’t fix as that’s a kernel issue.

              • amigan
                AEnglish
                1·
                5 months ago

                Spotify is just an electron app. You can disable any GPU access just like you can with chrome via a flag.

                My point is, unless spotify is trying to call a heretofore unimplemented syscall, it can be made to run. The linuxulator is basically as good as native.

                • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeOPEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  Yeah tbh I made a mess of the Linux environment. I am gonna reinstall and see what happens. There are other potentially GPU related things going on on this system though so IDK. Like I could disable it for that one application but that wouldn’t fix the other issues if that makes sense.

                  The Linuxulator is cool but I kind of don’t trust it. Maybe I will try Linux containers.

                  • amigan
                    AEnglish
                    1·
                    5 months ago

                    My advice is to ditch GhostBSD, you are basically putting yourself further into the corner than you already are by trying to use FreeBSD on the desktop.

                    Linux binaries run just by a syscall shim. There’s not much to trust or distrust. If all the syscalls are implemented and mapped to native FreeBSD syscalls, the thing works. Otherwise, it doesn’t.