Amarok was KDE’s flagship music player during the KDE3 and Plasma 4 days. For Plasma 5, a new music player called Elisa was created with Kirigami which is the current KDE flagship music player. The last full release of Amarok was 2.9.0 in 2018, still targeting Qt4. A Plasma 5 port was started with the intention of being released as Amarok 3.0, but despite a usable alpha 2.9.71 release in 2021, the full 3.0 release was never completed. Outside of the occasional odd pull request, the project was essentially dead and was listed as unmaintained by apps.kde.org.

Two weeks ago, occasional contributor Tuomas Nurmi, author of over a third of these pull requests, made a push to become an Amarok maintainer, starting this thread in the mailing list: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/2024-March/014748.html

In the thread, Tuomas expresses his desire to revive Amarok. He believes a second alpha for 3.0 can be released in mid-April and a full Plasma 6 port could be completed within 2024 after the release of 3.0. Tuomas has since created a fair amount of merges and fixes in preparation for 3.0 and has shown no sign of stopping.

This is very exciting news. For many, Elisa isn’t a satisfying replacement for Amarok. It simply doesn’t come close to matching Amarok’s power and features. It also has the drawback of being a convergent application, meaning compromises have to be made to make the interface work well on smartphones.

It’s also victim to the many drawbacks of Kirigami. Theming is worse since Plasma has to convert QtWidget themes to QtQuick themes, which works great for Breeze, but meh for everything else. There is no good equivalent for KStandardAction/QAction, KHamburgerMenu or KStandardShortcut. Any Kirigami app that wants customizable toolbars and shortcuts need to go out of their way to implement them, while QtWidgets apps just get them for free. You also don’t have a good QDockWidget equivalent that I know of. Apps that do bother to reimplement some of these features (Haruna is the only one I know of) still don’t have toolbar customization to nearly the same extent QtWidgets apps do. Most Kirigami apps don’t bother with this at all and lose a lot of customizability in the process. Elisa is not Haruna, tho. There is no shortcut customization, there is no toolbar to customize and that hamburger menu can’t be turned into a menubar.

For years, the solution was Strawberry, a fork of Amarok still under active development. Thing is, Strawberry is a fork of Clementine, itself a fork of Amarok 1.4. That’s old. That’s 2008 Amarok, not 2018 Amarok. Clementine had its first release in 2010, when Amarok was still going strong. It was for good reason, Amarok 2.0 introduced a very divisive redesign of the interface, which prompted a fork. But this means 2.0+ Amarok and Strawberry are actually very different beasts. For those who were using Amarok 2.9, switching to Strawberry meant switching to a new music player, making it far from an ideal successor. So I’m very much excited for the return of Amarok, the best music player KDE has had.