Same, really nice distro back then.

Is this a joke? Even if you ignore the overly fancy stuff like those Forum-like features Matrix can hardly do the basics correctly. The encryption constantly causes issues, Voice feature is still beta, the UX is a mess, the UI is lackluster, basic features are missing (you can’t even set the Voice Activation level, wtf), there are no integrated admin tools and the third-party UIs are either wonky or lackluster, the software (both server and client) is a bloated mess that takes aeons to do anything and is awful to develop (a friend looked at it and quickly decided it’s not worth all the hassle)…

Of course there’s a difference in size, still they could’ve figured things out way better in the last decade. People ask for voice channels since 2017, and not just did they have a working Jitsi integration, there also are WebRTC frameworks ready to use they could’ve picked. And even now with that Beta feature it is more than obvious they do not want it to work as simple as Discord, but more like a professional software for meetings (that or they just really love creating convoluted UI).

There’s no way to get any majority of Discord users to use this mess. We discussed this once in our local hackerspace, and while the general opinion of course was more complex given some people know how complicated the protocol is, there also was a consensus that the software as it is is “not great to use”. And if even hackers / enthusiasts are saying this there’s no way in hell to convince casual users.

To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?

Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.

Not to mention it will not just gobble up itself now, but also all the bad code on the internet.

If you ask ChatGPT or Codestral how to safe a file in memory it will in almost all cases save those data chunks you’re reading from somewhere in a list and suggest appending every chunk to that list.

Yeah sure you can do that instead of using io.bytesIO() (probably, until weird things happen), but what the fuck. And that’s Python, literally the language those models are supposed to excel in.

Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>

Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.

You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.

This. Once you know how to use it it’s way, way more preferable than dealing with all the problems that come from how scattered the Linux ecosystem is and how little control you as a dev had about app distribution. Development and debugging gets more predictable, people can get (app-related) fixes faster, it’s hypothetically more secure (if Flatpak gets their shit together) and with the payment backend for Flatpak repos they (Gnome Foundation & KDE e.V.) work on it finally becomes properly viable to distribute paid apps. All the different hacky ways that are currently circulating (which are often outdated, only work on certain distros etc.) to offer paid applications are honestly obnoxious and expensive to maintain. Not to mention Flatpaks work great on immutable distros.

Just hope they gonna moderate things properly. Flathub & perhaps a few others have to place themselves as the de-facto standard marketplace to define and uphold all the important values the Linux community is organized around once it gets commercial. Not to do so would be a phenomenal mistake and end up in enshittification once the tech bros start targeting Linux.

So yeah, Flatpaks, Snaps and (maybe) AppImages are probably the future for most common end-user distros. Sorry for the small tangent.

I rather hope for a PS Vita moment.

Wouldn’t have made much sense since it doesn’t use GNU utils by default. Also Hinduism lacks a sufficient amount of elephants to put all big source distros there anyway.

It would make sense in a meme about docker though, Alpine is really popular for containers.

If the extension API would be changed so they couldn’t crash our shell session, extensions would become way less powerful and be mostly useless.

That’s not true, a proper API would enable probably 90% of existing extensions to be portable since they more often than not “just” add stuff into different places without really modifying anything. And if they really are worried so much about developer freedom they could still allow for the current monkey-patching approach to exist for those extensions that would otherwise not work, so the user ends up with more options than just “no extension at all” or “from now on shit may crash”. To allow random code to run right in the shell (which is one of the most important pieces of software in an end-user facing system) and/or actively manipulate its code without sufficient measures to ensure stability or at least recoverability is just not an acceptable status Quo in my opinion.

I’m sad and annoyed about this whole situation (therefore memes) ever since a Gnome dev confirmed to me they (meaning some board; their orga structure is rather stiff) actively decided against doing anything about this problem. I love Gnome, but I had to move to KDE simply to have a modern, stable desktop that I could trust in a production environment without feeling so barebone.

If someone posts AI slop memes, help ratio them.

• Me

Nothing, unless you really want to use a DE that’s still lacking behind in its adoption. There are a few tools that still only offer early support for it (like RustDesk), but otherwise Wayland is a way better choice these days. However if you got an Nvidia GPU and need to use the proprietary driver you might be forced to still use X11. Their pile of garbage still routinely bugs on Wayland, and given their work on NVK I doubt that thing will ever get fully fixed.

To my knowledge it isn’t them constantly running that wears them out most, but spinning up and down very often. Weren’t NAS drives designed to never spin down for that very reason?

Especially since the manpages are not written to always be comprehensible for end-users, but for developers and professionals. Some tools like tldr can help, however they rarely come preinstalled and aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Well, they arguably can also be used as one big long-term storage. Not sure who’d need to save so much data for a long time, but there surely will be at least some people who do and buy the “modern solution” over old HDDs thinking they’re better in general. As the “family backup” for example, or as cold storage solution in faculties that can be quickly accessed if needed.

Read somewhere about a professor who used SSDs to “permanently” store important data on SSDs (perhaps in the comments of the article above) for a few years. Well, wasn’t that permanent…

More reliable

Heavily depends. If you want to use it as long-term cold storage you absolutely should not use SSDs, they’re losing data when left unpowered for too long. While HDDs are also not perfect in retaining data forever, they won’t fail as quickly when left on a shelf.

Afaik KDE and Gnome do use SIGKILL at some point except for certain processes like running package managers. At least they are able to forcibly close almost anything if you really insist on shutting down now, depending on your (distro) configuration. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from my experience in Gnome you have to click on shutdown twice for it to happen, while KDE gives applications a 60 sec grace period unless you click a button in a notification pop-up.

Edit: Not sure how it is in the terminal aside from those 1:30min grace periods during shutdown.

Whatever you need to tell yourself about people voicing criticism the community culture to shut it down. I’m already contributing to the best of my abilities, so please stop with the “just fix it yourself” nonsense. Not even professionals like Torvalds would have the ability to to all that. Hell, not even companies can; System76 ends up creating a whole new DE because the cultural and structural issues with Gnome were so severe, and they’re working on it for years now (arguably they could’ve moved to KDE, a new DE without old baggage might be a good idea though). Some parts of the Linux community even are so toxic they’re famous for ripping each other apart regularly, like the Kernel devs.

It’s this whole culture and the bad decisions it causes I’m criticizing. And the only way to change anything about such a thing literally is to loudly criticize it, and to introduce new people with new perspectives. Who unfortunately more often than not get alienated by all the toxicity.

You are contradicting yourself.

I already admitted my previous statement being bad.

You are looking for a walled garden that protects its users.

No, I don’t. There’s a difference between a walled garden and a safe environment, the word itself even says it. Windows, iOS etc. outright build closed boxes you can’t escape. The Linux community rightfully doesn’t like that, but to a degree where we hardly even have proper safety rails next to cliffs and either no or insufficient warning labels next to exposed 11kV powerlines. Yet we expect people who don’t know what they see to not hurt themselves and instead stand still and study books for a few weeks. Even worse, in an attempt to keep answers as universal as possible the correct answers often are that “it’s easy, just hook up X to the 11kV powerline” (equal to editing grub.conf, xorg.conf, or anything else that could literally kill your system or user-essential parts like the graphical interface).

I’m so fed up with the notion that any change that adds safety rails is seen as building walls. Just because you have to add “–no-preserve-root” to delete your root folder you’re not prevented from destroying your OS if you want to (people seriously argued against this change). Improving the apt warning so humans pick it up is not a wall either.

Just criticizing a toxic culture that causes systemic problems. It’s both sad and funny you still think I’m the one with the problem though.