this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
259 points (95.8% liked)

Linux

48334 readers
611 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 133 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (9 children)

What alternative would you suggest if I just want to talk to my mates while gaming? I gave up on setting up TeamSpeak after like an hour and many crashes and errors. I was a TeamSpeak fan for many years when using windows, but on Linux I highly dislike it.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Element has been working for me and my friends. At the moment, it just embeds Jitsi within the client to do group calls (which works fine. Jisti isn't bad by any means), but native group calls are being worked on and are currently in beta!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Calls should come any month now. element-x just works on voice messages. The app is already able to make calls, you may try it b starting a call here and opening the link with the app. Just the ui and the things surrounding it are missing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wish they would work on proper voice channels like discord has. The whole 'meeting room' zoom call style thing is obnoxious to use, and the screen sharing has so much lag.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are "Video Rooms". They're in beta too.
Also, screen sharing is done via the same platform agnostic web APIs every other Electron-based app uses, though.
I got rid of screen capture induced lag by switching to Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The screen capture isn't the issue, encoding the stream is where discord manages to do it with only a second or so of latency. Jitsi and similar seem to have much longer delays.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There is "broadcasting" in element/ schildichat. Is that the same?

There's no lag on my end, might be server/ connection dependent

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can use Mumble instead of teamspeak.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

If you just want to talk, mumble would be a very lightweight alternative.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

i just got matrix up and running. its a federated ommunications specification. id invite you to mine but im still ironing things out. check out https://www.matrix.org

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Does matrix have voice chat, video chat?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It has an integration with Jitsi.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It has a native implementation for 1 to 1 calls and group calls is currently in beta for the Element client.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

ive yet to test it myself but it seems to support voice and video

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mumble (is comoletely free software and has a better quality even than teamspeak)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And requires setting up and managing a server, which costs time and money and requires a certain degree of expertise. Also it can’t really be used as a primary chat app, so you still have to use another app for that. It also doesn’t support features like livestreams so that’s another application you may need.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There is a pretty similar looking and function called Revolt that could be useful for getting people that are used to Discord to switch. I think they also have a long goal of being able to send and receive messages and calls with Discord. Obviously they don't have that atm, but it is open-source and nice to at least know about in the event a quick exodus of Discord is needed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Mumble is your best bet for an actual gaming voice chat setup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Did you try the TeamSpeak 5 beta client? It uses CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) I think so it should be pretty platform agnostic. You can join TS3 servers with it just fine :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Idk about them, but it's a centralized, locked-down service that absorbs and holds information and data hostage like tomorrow.

As someone who's trying to completely avoid Discord, it's quite frustrating how many communities and projects will put important information in their Discords, and nowhere else. You have to have an account to see it, and it also isn't searchable in a search engine. It is actually quite terrible for pretty much everyone.

Element/Matrix lets you peek into public chats and servers/spaces without an account, so it can definitely be done. They won't do it though, because they gotta make you feel dat FOMO lol.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I mean cool, but good luck convincing the vast majority of users leaving Discord for Matrix.

This development is beneficial for the Linux gaming ecosystem, proprietary be damned.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I can acknowledge all that and still say fuck discord. I never mentioned herding everyone over, I just explained why I think it's a parasite and why I have a strong disliking towards it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Don't need the majority. The majority is not even interested in these communities. The ones that are, are likely proponents of FOSS themselves and should (in theory) switch over.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All you have to do is bridge the two together and have the Matrix one shown more prominently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you expect your average Discord user to bother going through such hoops?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sorry. What I meant was that the project maintainers should do that, so the Discord users can use Discord but Matrix is still the main option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maintainers. The people that make the project.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thought we werr talking about the communities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While the community is often what is providing the information, one person or group is the one creating and distributing the Discord server. You can't have an entire community create a Discord server; one person has to do that, and it's most often the project maintainers. I was saying that the people creating the Discord servers should also create Matrix spaces and bridge the two together.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Hmm, interesting. I mean, I personally do not engage in specific projects. In my case, I did not find e.g. large enough mathematics server and PL community server in Matrix. This made me rarely visit matrix..

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Matrix is a better platform for realtime communication, but it has the same issue with needing an account and being difficult to search. Any discussions that take place on Discord or Matrix will be fleeting, as it prioritizes only the most recent discussion in the chat. Thus making long form discussions about particular topics impossible.

All technical discussions should be archived on a searchable forum. If you are using a source forge like GitHub and GitLab, then public discussions should take place there. There's no better place for discussions and questions about code than in the same place where the code is hosted itself. Platform integrations make it very easy to associate discussions to commits and merge requests.

While not ideal, even hosted forum platforms like Lemmy and Reddit are still better than using a chat client. If only to serve as a platform for broader public discussions and questions. People are more likely to already have a Lemmy or Reddit account than they are to have a GitHub or GitLab account.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I do agree Discord shouldn't be used as a Gitlab issue tracker, yet development teams still insists on continuing this practice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't understand how so many people use that centralized, proprietary piece of big tech spyware for like almost everything. There are so many interesting communities out there that exclusively exist on Discord. I hate how some software projects and games use only Discord to post updates, news, patchnotes, documentation and even download links. And they expect people to just "join our Discord" for suggestions, bug reports and troubleshooting. I don't have a Discord account and I don't plan on making one, ever. There is so much useful and interesting information currently out there that people are never going to get to see simply because it's all scattered in random chat rooms on random Discord servers. And if any of those chat rooms, Discord servers or even Discord itself gets shut down all of that information will inevitably become lost media.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Old electron version (meaning no screensharing on wayland), really buggy linux application, no encryption, poorly enforced rules and policies, micro transactions... Honestly, the linux version of discord is so terrible that I've been running it from a web browser for the last month or so, it's genuinely much better lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yesterday they enabled monitoring of all messages in their servers. It was obvious before, but now they are getting even more 1984. Communities should migrate as soon as possible.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe it, but citation(s) please?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6AlbG2ZoKs

They were already scanning every message and DM for data tracking and whatnot to sell anyway, the only difference now is they're using it for TOS violations.

Privacy-wise nothing has changed, but actual consequences for actually bad things like racism / transphobia / csam / etc. is good. The only real issue is what if they decide that sharing a music file is piracy and now your account is penalized? What about uploading an NES ROM to a friend via a DM? Or sharing a link to an anime piracy website?

It's the kind of thing that has to be a balance between making sure users aren't doing stuff that is strictly against Discord's rules, but also about making a good-faith attempt to limit things that can get Discord themselves in trouble from companies who are becoming more and more aware that Discord has been used as a piracy-safe haven for quite some time now. (Like how they're limiting their "using discord upload URLs like your own CDN" issue last month.)