I remember simply downloading an archive containing the portable binary from Deadbeef website. It worked out of the box on Daedalus, but not sure how the situation is with Excalibur - despite having been using Foobar2000 for many years (which Deadbeef mimics quite closely), I found Audacious more to my liking.

Deb-multimedia should be okay for simple, isolated packages, some can even be grabbed as .debs and installed as local pkgs without adding the repository in the sources list. But yeah, for the more complex things requiring many dependencies... it's best to look at other alternatives first and only use it as a last resort - very, very carefully.

Cherche-Lune - Circe

Installed the deb, looks good - thanks for the suggestion!

Youtube is a bleeding nightmare to use in my country, but I still manage to access it occasionally.
Sometimes it's the ISP's fault, sometimes the site itself blocks certain videos if you don't have an account, try to watch through embedded link or use a frontend like Invidious.

ZABADAK - Harvest Rain

Yes, it's a very nice linear video editor, something akin to VirtualDub. You can also losslessly cut videos by keyframes, or splice them together if they share the same FPS, bitrate and dimensions. The filter set is quite respectable as well.

I considered adding the deb-multimedia repository and installing it that way, but it requires very careful management and resolution of possible conflicts, so I'm using the appimage format for now. Although it's good that they provide several options for installation.

I haven't noticed much difference in speed compared to Handbrake, but yeah - both programs have their pros and cons. The usage of GTK4 by HB is certainly unfortunate, and the program doesn't play nice with some themes due to their choice to forgo the Libadwaita stylesheet support.

To me, XFCE still has a few saving graces - it can look good and be unobtrusive, but I realize it's pretty much a sinking ship by now.
Will probably switch to IceWM or LXQt at some point given the circumstances.

Thank you, I tested it in Xfce - works as intended.

Dark Orange - Traumwandler
La Floa Maldita - Sorciére

Not really. The Clock applet dialog is indeed part of Xfce, but that Time and Date Settings window definitely comes from gnome-system-tools - which Xfce (for some odd reason) still relies on for system time configuration. Without it being present (as is probably the case with the default Xfce installation), the Xfce Clock applet settings will not even show the 'Time and Date Settings' button.

Orchis - Gloria Melancholia
Orchis - Above Us Is Heaven

Sounds promising, no more having to go multiarch for the sake of Wine and generating separate 32/64 prefixes. I hope WoW64 support really is on par with the old 32-bit Wine. Looks like .NET and DirectMusic are also available out of the box now, which is great if that's the case. It's about time for these things to be included by default.