The developer of Parabolic, a YouTube video downloader app, has decided to stop supporting the Snap version and has removed it from the store. This has complicated my workflow a bit, and while I respect the developer’s decision, I’m reaching out to see if any collaborator experienced in Snap packaging would be interested in taking over.
In my opinion, it is currently the best GUI tool for downloading YouTube videos, as it allows for simultaneous downloads and includes thumbnail support. Furthermore, its interface integrates seamlessly with Ubuntu GNOME. I am currently getting by using the terminal with the yt-dlp snap, which does everything I need, but since I work across multiple machines, having a reliable graphical interface would be much more efficient.
I hope to one day gain enough technical knowledge to lend a hand myself, but in the meantime, I would love to see this app back in the store. Thanks to everyone!
Looking at the repo, this looks like an unfortunate circumstance of Parabolic being keen to use the latest version of GTK, which is better available in Flatpak form than Snap, because the Gnome team publish their own Gnome SDK for Flatpak and test it prior to releases, but Snap is effectively done after the fact without Gnome upstreams involvement.
Whilst you could put a lot of effort in to working around it compiling GTK separately from source and get any GTK version needed, it’s one of those situations where I’d be keen on asking upstream first if they could potentially slow down on the GTK requirements. Snap’s latest Gnome extension is only behind 1 version from the latest upstream stable, which is only a few months of lagging behind and usually less than that if Ubuntu 26.04 wasn’t round the corner!
Without knowing the codebase, I wonder if they actually make use of features in the latest GTK environments and might actually be fine using older versions if the build system were modified to accept them, or might be amenable to not updating so quickly to the latest GTK until Snap itself had it.
From what I’ve seen on their Github issues, it doesn’t look like there’s an issue with snap philosophically, just that the work to their new C# release hasn’t been done by anyone and combined with the GTK version requirements on top, it is an awkward application to snap because building your own GTK is an antipattern in our ecosystem that does push the skillset up for little benefit given the Gnome extensions exist for the same purpose.
It might be worth then asking upstream about their GTK requirements to see if they could be slightly more lenient than they are, however, if they do insist on keeping GTK modern and their app actually uses the newest API’s available every 6 months, then I’d concede in saying Flatpak is a better priority to them given Gnome upstream pushes for Flathub specifically. There is a chance though that the newest API’s aren’t being used and you could build against e.g., GTK 4.18 fine and yet run it on Gnome 4.20+ also, working for both environments by todays latest releases. GTK4 has forward compatibility, whereas GTK3 didn’t, so maybe the version checks are overly strict?
Can Libadwaita apps be built in one version and used in a more recent version? Like what Qt apps do.
If so, then it would be necessary to have an extension equivalent to kde-neon-6, which updates the Qt6 version.
If I’m not mistaken, kf6-core is created based on packages from the KDE Neon repository; I don’t know if there’s a distro equivalent to KDE Neon that uses Gnome.
However, if the situation requires using specific versions of Libadwaita, I suppose it would be necessary to create content snaps for each Gnome version.
In Core 18/20 the GTK3 extensions were explicitly versioned like this. Since GTK3 went into maintenance mode, there’s only really one version of it in the wild these days, so the gnome extension just includes the last version of GTK3 and the latest GTK4 that’s been tested for it.
GTK4 and Libadwaita have strong ABI and API compatibility guarantees vs GTK3, which is why rather than having explicitly versioned Gnome versions in Core 22 and above, the extension is just gnome and the GTK parts can swap out without rebuilding the consumer snaps, and the vast majority of applications are fine with GTK being a single release out of date except where those apps are literally part of the Gnome ecosystem where you can understand them taking advantage of newer features ASAP. I’d doubt Parabolic is in that same category so it’d be worth checking.
E.G., Pinta’s snap is running fine with the current GTK 4.18 in snap and also GTK 4.20 in the Flatpak release, built from the same codebase. Like Parabolic, Pinta is also running on .NET, so on a very similar stack. Pinta was fine running on much lower versions than that (4.8) until an update in March 2025 that absolutely was considered critical but also incredibly niche amongst the majority of desktop apps (relating to handling memory pressure better on bitmaps and having to go lower level to optimise that).
If it weren’t for a single bit of functionality, Pinta would still run on GTK 4.8; so if you compare that to e.g., Parabolic, does it actually make use of new features or is it just a case of prefering to encourage new releases but isn’t actually required. The maintainers would know better.
But Flatpak will always have a slight advantage over Snap when you have scenarios like this for example: Are we Glycin ready? to which I’m still waiting to see what happens when it finally drops! GTK here is willing to break snap and leave that as a downstream problem to resolve, and these integration issues through releases will always cause some delay.
If people were willing to help volunteer, it’s this repository here:
But you can see e.g., it’s not just a case of pulling upstream source directly, because there’s patches here:
gnome-sdk/patches at gnome-46-2404-sdk · ubuntu/gnome-sdk · GitHub and these might need adjusting or e.g., for something like the Glycin thread above, maybe new ones adding.
And ultimately, all those parts in that snapcraft.yaml need to work together not just the biggest examples, so it’s a fair bit of stuff to test and keep in sync , Gnome/Flatpak essentially gets to start that work months before snap does as well as being able to patch upstream directly to do so.
(And I can now see the answer is Glycin is disabled, which I’m going to ask if we can try something else instead, so sorry for delaying it further everyone!)
If you just want to download a single video or song, Video Downloader is the best option on Snap. However, for my workflow, I need something capable of batch downloading several videos and also downloading the YouTube thumbnails. And if I’m being demanding, I need it to allow login credentials to download age-restricted videos.
To be honest, that last part used to fail for me in Parabolic, which forced me to use 4KVideo Downloader, that is actually very well-packaged as a Snap (thanks Tsugu), but it doesn’t download thumbnails and usually takes a few days to update—meaning it occasionally stops working. That’s something that never happens with Parabolic. Also, 4K not is 100% free and is very bloated (500 mb…).
For now, I’m getting by using the terminal with yt-dlp on the Edge channel. Many thanks to everyone for looking into the issue with Parabolic and for continuing to make Snapcraft a platform with so many great, modern apps for Ubuntu.
, Gnome/Flatpak essentially gets to start that work months before snap does as well as being able to patch upstream directly to do so.