Learn how to – How To Install and use FreeTube on Linux / macOS

Learn how to – How To Install and use FreeTube on Linux / macOS.

In this guide, I’ll take you through How to Install and use FreeTube on Linux / macOS. FreeTube is an open source Desktop YouTube application that’s focused on privacy. FreeTube allows you to Watch your favorite YouTube videos without any normal ads you’ll get on browser applications like Firefox, Opera e.t.c.

How Does It Work?

FreeTube uses the YouTube API to search for videos and youtube-dl API to grab the raw video files and play them in a basic HTML5 video player, preventing being tracked with cookies or JavaScript. Subscriptions, history, and saved videos are stored locally on the user’s computer and are never sent out to anyone else. You own your data. This is the cool thing about FreeTube – privacy and security!.

Features of FreeTube

• Freedom to watch videos without any annoying ads
• You can subscribe to channels without an account
• The power to store subscriptions, history, and saved videos locally
• It can Import and  Backup subscriptions
• Mini Player based on HTML5
• Light / Dark Theme to choose from

FreeTube is Available for Windows / Mac / Linux though still available in Beta version. It uses the proprietary YouTube HTTP API with Video URLs being resolved using a youtube-dl-api-server.

Install and use FreeTube on Linux / macOS

The first step is to download FreeTube on your Linux, MacOS or Windows machine and install it. Head to the FreeTube releases page. As of this writing, the latest release is 0.16.0 beta.

RPM systems (RHEL based)

For CentOS / Fedora, download the .rpm package and install it with the command:

sudo yum -y install wget
export VER="0.16.0"
wget https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/releases/download/v${VER}-beta/freetube_${VER}_amd64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall FreeTube-${VER}.x86_64.rpm

Ubuntu / Debian

For Debian/Ubuntu systems, download .deb package and install it using dpkg Debian package management tool.

sudo apt-get install -y wget
export VER="0.16.0"
wget https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/releases/download/v${VER}-beta/FreeTube_${VER}_amd64.deb
sudo apt install -f ./FreeTube_${VER}_amd64.deb

If your systems run ARM processor architecture, the download it instead of amd64.

macOS

For macOS, download the package with name Darwin in it. Extract it and copy the content:

cd ~/Downloads
export VER="0.16.0"
wget https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/releases/download/v${VER}-beta/FreeTube-${VER}-mac.dmg
open FreeTube-${VER}-mac.dmg

Using FreeTube

Launch the application from your App search application on Mac / Linux or Windows.

You should get a window similar to below on launching it up.

Explore all the functions like subscriptions, save, search e.t.c.