Published on Apr 18th, 2026.
I want to take a moment to praise a piece of software that has been good to me for the last ~2 years I’ve been using it: Strawberry Music Player. It serves as a music player and collection organizer without doing much more. I’ve become increasingly fond of this application because I finally recognized it as a shining light among the software I use on a daily basis:
- Its UI is simple, dense, and makes it easy to do the things I need to do: search for music, queue it up, look at lyrics, see playback status.
- The interface hasn’t changed at all since I started using it. I haven’t needed to relearn how to perform any of these basic tasks that I use it for.
- It doesn’t nag me nor make any attempt to alter my behavior as I use it.
- It’s fast on my computer.
The interface may seem clunky to contemporary design standards and tastes, but I appreciate that it does what it needs to do and gets out of the way. It stands in sharp contrast to the constant noise of modern UI design: low information density, constant interruptions, attention-grabbing videos, or, God forbid, a chatbot.
I’ve been brewing a hypothesis that open-source software is more likely to be stable over longer time horizons given the lack of pressure for commercial growth. Under this idea I’ve migrated a lot of my digital life over to open-source equivalents: using Linux (w/KDE) as my desktop operating system, LibreOffice for productivity software, Mastodon for social media, etc. Though I don’t think the hypothesis completely holds: Obsidian and You Need A Budget have proven to be two applications that have held very steady for me over the years, though both share the commonality of not being VC-backed.
In any case, I just wanted to give credit where credit is due: Strawberry is a great piece of software, and I’m very grateful to the maintainers for the design decisions they’ve made!