The Aqualung music player had its 2.0 release earlier this week. This new major release comes a solid decade after the preceding one (Aqualung 1.0 was released in 2015).

Changes to the player’s core functions are minimal: just a handful of memory handling fixes (from the Leakage and Safety Department), more or less.

The most substantial change, also the main motivation for touching Aqualung after so many years, is migrating the UI from GTK2 to GTK3. In turn, this has been motivated by GTK2’s EOL in 2020. Declared obsolete by most major Linux distributions (even FreeBSD), GTK2 will, in the foreseeable future, stop being carried by Linux distributions – dragging dependent programs into obsolescence. We wanted Aqualung to avoid this fate.

Such a major change under the hood necessarily brought about changes to the program’s appearance. The new look is arguably cleaner, exclusively depending on very light CSS for theming the interface. Skin support is gone; the only choice is the use of a dark theme.

Here’s a taste of the new look with the default vis-à-vis the dark theme:


The face of Aqualung 2.0 (click to enlarge)

I hasten to add that other than the removal of skin support, there are absolutely no other breaking changes in this 2.0 release. Your Music Store, Playlist, configuration, etc. will all work exactly as before, so no need to worry about the upgrade.

Users and distribution package maintainers, please take note! Head over to the main Aqualung website to get your copy of the latest release.

I hope you will continue to enjoy Aqualung, listening to your favourite records in the decades to come. I know I will.

Special thanks to longtime Aqualung maintainer Jeremy Evans for testing and merging a substantial amount of changes on short notice.