I would love for VLC to become the defacto player in Linux. The distros could build a skin interface to make it "pretty" but, rely on VLC for the work.

Every machine on every OS I've installed and made VLC my default player for everything. It always "just works".
#VLC

I have a guess why.

They release a new version of GTK with new widgets but they are not porting the applications which already existed.

The cynic in me thinks that this is because this just hard to do. So they take the new widget and add a minimal application wrapper around it and call it a day.

Gedit -> gnome-text-editor
gnome-terminal -> console
eye-of-gnome -> loupe.

and now Showtime

This player is currently in nightly and yet worked flawlessly for my use cases. They have implemented many of the essential features and many more are actively developed.

Especially good for those who want a better Gnome-ish UI than VLC hacks.

@redworm Indeed, the playback experience is on point, and I didn't feel the need to have anything more.

— Sourav