It seems that Google wants to prevent the use of Adblockers and you need to pay to have no ads on videos. I do understand that people want to make money but for me, it’s all noise (in terms of signal to noise ratio). And I know that I’m not the only one that is like this with the noise sensitivity and would rather support content-creators in other ways.
My ask here is there any GUI-based third-party FOSS that are KDE and Linux friendly apps for YouTube that feature NO ADS? I’m aware of youtube-dl but that’s command-line.
I normally like KDE applications, but I had a terrible first experience with plasmatube where it didn’t work at all. Not every app can be a homer I guess.
As for OP, I love to use freetube which is AGPL licensed, zero ads, goes great length to let you avoid YouTube’s anti-features. Highly customizable where you can turn off comments, video suggestions/recommendations, search suggestions, can use invidious instances, can use a third party video player to pipe to if google is blocking the instance… the list goes on and on. I would say development of freetube is faster development to keep up with google and has far more functionality. It’ll make your head spin.
the GUI front end for that package is called media downloader (flatpak) or video downloader (snap).
they will allow you to download content to your local machine and watch it without ads, but you still need a browser of some kind to find the link, and so still vulnerable to “noise” as you say.
YES! It requires a minor learning curve, but is mostly self-explanatory. So much more than just a “YouTube without ads” app. BUT, if that’s all one wants, Grayjay will do the trick.
I use Freetube only now, it incorporates Sponsorblock, allows for an ignore keyword list (great during the elections and after), and allows you to see exactly what you want of your subscriptions by exporting them from youtube and importing them into freetube.
Hey all! Thank you for all of your recommendations; I decided to go with FreeTube. Just a heads up for those who want to get it, please use the Flatpak or the Deb instead of the AppImages, those seem to not work on my end!
I can highly recommend freetube aswell. Just a headsup, google sometimes breaks their video streaming, so it can fail at times. Their github usually has issue for those times for tracking.
Likewise, google has been on the attack against adblocking lately, and has affected freetube to need some regular update here as well. I use this on arch, so it’s usually frequent the AUR package is updated for arch, but ymmv with Ubuntu.
While I feel a bit bad i don’t give likes or subs to channels via freetube now, using youtube is rather disgusting to use without adblockers and a somewhat mandatory step if using youtube at all now. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the content cartels pushing people away.
Sadly the same for all the streaming services that keep testing tolerances adding yet more minutes of ads monthly now, building tolerances to see what people will bare. None here, thanks for the fish.
To be honest I can only recommend a firefox fork and ublock and tweak some of the rules. Google killed ublock and all the others with manifest V3. And there built-in ones don’t update fast enough to be useful even with the ublock rules. but if you must use a chrome base browser its nice to set up ad guard home though it wont help on youtube.