Ticket Booth For Linux

If you're looking for valid alternatives for IMDb, then there's a very good chance you'll stumble upon TMDb.org, a very popular crowd-sourced movie information database/platform.

TMDb.org aims to offer the same "things" as IMDb, and thanks to its nifty API, it's being used by a wide range of film-related platforms/consoles, websites, web apps, mobile apps, as well as desktops such as XBMC, Plex Media Server, or MythTV (just to name a few).

Since TMDb's API is so good, there's really no surprise that it's the perfect piece for any watchlist desktop app.

Ticket Booth is one such application. It allows you to build your watchlist of movies and TV shows/series, find relevant information, as well as keep track of watched titles, all from the comforts of your Linux desktop.

The whole point of this app is to build and maintain a personal watchlist of all your favorite movies and TV series. The main appeal (for me at least) is its GUI. Thanks to its GTK/Libadwaita GUI, it's the perfect app of this sort for a GNOME user, and I personally like it a lot.

It's quite satisfying to build your perfect (short-term) watchlist on the app, by manually adding movie and TV series entries.

Because the app uses the TMDb API, it means that there are a few "limitations." What I mean by that is that it doesn't feature the full spectrum of features offered by TMDb.org. For instance, if you create a TMDb.org account, you can log all the movies and TV shows you've watched, and build and maintain said watchlist over the course of a long period of time without the fear of losing the info.

Not only that, but you can also improve the information from the site's database, as well as take part in movie and TV series discussions (which is a feature that IMDb removed a while back, and arguably one of the aspects that makes TMDb more attractive to some users).

Of course, I can really critique the app's creator for this because these are all limitations of the API and not the app itself. The app itself uses the API quite efficiently, but the same cannot be said about how to app uses resources.

In short, I found this app very resource-intensive (with pretty massive CPU spikes even while idling). It is worth keeping in mind that the app was made by a single developer and not by a team of dedicated community members. Long story short, it does require a bit of optimization work.

I found Ticket Booth to be a nice app to look at, but I really wished it was a bit better than it is (at least in its current form - version 1.0.1). Most of its limitations stem from the TMDb API (which is also the only element that makes this app exist). This makes it the perfect app for the job if you want to build a short-term watchlist.