Yesterday I installed a new (Meltdown-proofed) kernel on a friend's machine. She showed me a webcam that she had acquired. She had no idea how to use it and frankly nor did I!

We plugged it in and the kernel recognised it and loaded the v4linux driver, so we looked in synaptic for a suitable program to run. I noticed cheese, which I have seen a lot of posts on, so I said, "Let's install that. It's a well known program."

It came with a slew of dependencies including several gnome libraries. But she has plenty of room on her hard drive, so I said, "What the heck! Let's just do it."

And do you know, we couldn't get that program to work. All we ever saw was a black window with an error message on it. When I googled the message, lots of other people had seen it, but I found only one post (in an Ubuntu forum) that suggested how to solve it, and the method (reducing the resolution) didn't work for us. But I noticed a lot of references to guvcview as a better option. So I decided to install that.

It came with only one dependency! I thought maybe it was piggybacking on the stuff we'd already downloaded for cheese, but that turned out not to be the case. When I deinstalled cheese afterwards, it took (probably) all its dependencies with it. But guvcview worked right out of the box.

Now can someone explain why a small and simple application works while one that brings half of Gnome with it doesn't?

sure, the problem with loads of dependencies (created by packagers) is sometimes stuff gets left out, or one dependency might not work-be deprecated-poorly maintained etc... Hazel, you just discovered the blessing of KISS.

may I introduce you to my friend Slackware or Salix:
http://slackware.com/
https://salixos.org/
of course there are a few others that still follow KISS, but Debian and *buntus are not one of them.

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Not all webcams work with Cheese.

If it doesn't work with Cheese, it may work with Guvcview.

Cheese is using gstreamer. IMHO gstreamer is a big bug itself. Maybe it is improved now, I haven't used it for many years.

That's Gnome in a nutshell.

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That's why I don't use Debian.

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General - If you have ffmpeg and v4l2 you can do just about everything anyone could want with a webcam and most importantly gather info on your webcam's capabilities. Here's 2 examples

and

That last one will tell you if a resolution is possible or what type of ideal camera output to choose in any application to get the best results.

MPlayer and VLC also do nice webcam work.

Specific to Cheese and guvcview -

Guvcview does tend to work right out of the box but it also is a bit limited compared to Cheese, partly because it has some dbus issues. It tends to crash quite a bit. These are easily seen when running "guvcview" from CLI.

Cheese is a bit of an automated oddball. When it first starts up it is gathering information to self-configure. It causes some GTK errors in Debian Buster (latest testing) due to older, deprecated library calls. I started it 3 times and it failed twice but got better each time. The 3rd time was the charm and from then, on was at least simple and decent. However it experiences a number of errors on Debian Buster, too. In Cheese's defense it handled higher resolutions without crashing better than guvcview on my box in Debian.

BUT - Since this Debian is a trial install for testing a few items I don't care to expose on my main Slackware system, I visited AlienBob's Slackbuilds.org and searched for "cheese". Bob wisely translated that to "kamerka" which on any reasonable KDE install has zero dependencies. This is true of Slackware by default Full Recommended Install [that incidentally some (foolishly) call "bloated"] but probably since I have a lot of KDE on this Debian, it had zero dependencies as well. It worked right out of the box with zero errors, launched quickly and handled not only higher but maximum possible resolutions with nary a glitch.

Moral of the Story - There's at least two kinds of bloat - subjective and objective, each with possible subheadings of "for no good reason (possibly incompetence)" and "for improved performance, stability, configurability and flexibility". I am of the opinion since hard drive space is cheap and I consider my time valuable, I'd rather spend a few hours during install and initial setup if it saves me time and hassle over the long run where that can add up to huge losses of time, productivity and fun. I rather like Debian for the most part but I LOVE Slackware and the odd thing about that is most people perceive Slackware as "too much work manually resolving dependencies" when the opposite is actually true. PLUS, the developers are few, and that with a single final arbiter, so there is less cross-purposed conflicts, a dedication to simplicity and reliability that I haven't seen anyone close to in almost 20 years of use with LOTS of distro testing.

In relation to this thread, since kamerka is in Synaptic, please do try that and get a hint of the kind of simple stability that appeals to Slackers... and many, many others who just don't know it yet.

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One relevant factor (which I don't think I mentioned) is that this is a fairly old computer with 1 MB RAM, running AntiX. So there's plenty of drive space but not a lot of memory. I think that as long as guvcview works, she'd better stick to that. She's not the kind of user who will want to play around with different resolutions.

What Enorbet said about cheese configuring itself the first time around reminded me of something I'd forgotten. The first time we launched it, we did actually get a picture. On every subsequent occasion, we got nothing. It looks like cheese may have configured itself out of operation. Another reason for avoiding software that is too clever by half.

Kamerka sounds quite nice but it would bring the KDE libraries with it. Better stick to what we have.

antiX (full) ships with guvcview so I'm surprised you had to install it. Or are you using antiX-base version?

Yes, it was base when we installed it, although I've added a few bits and pieces since, including LO. This is a "learning" machine for a complete computer virgin, so she'd only be confused by a huge gamut of software. Mainly she's learning how to be confident on a computer, how to use a keyboard and mouse, surf the web, play music (she taught herself that!), write stuff on LO Writer, keep the system up to date and so on. As she asks about other things, we add them, like with the webcam. I'm glad you favour guvcview. I found it quite impressive.

I always thought giving new users a "full" distro experience was best, then they can play around with minimalism after experience is gained.

Yup, that's why I left Debian for Slackware.

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Just wanted to mention qv4l2 from v4l-utils. Ostensibly a test bench application, but it will do simple capturing.