So wait, Apple effectively mandates that users of their store lie to their users? Wonder if that’s something that can be tackled legally.

So now Mozilla can stop receiving their hush money, right?

Since when has any antivirus ever had the intent of actually protecting against viruses? The entire antivirus market is a scam.

, and the laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet port so off you go to buy a usb-eth adaptor.

What, no Android USB tether? It’s been native since Debian 6 IIRC.

Hahahahha! The sucker.

only half an hour

no information on the internet connection quality

Minetest I guess. Can’t trust that I can get Retroarch plus the cores and games I want on time, and it’s not worth the hassle for only 3 hrs drive.

Audacious can even theme itself using Winamp themes!

Eh, I’ve always felt these solutions are complementary, or supplementary, rather than a “versus”. Each one, in particular cases, covers gaps the others can’t cover. The only one that’s unneeded is Snap.

For example, I like Flatpak. I like that I can get software from an authorized hub, much like with a package manager. I like that the releases of the apps in the hub are mostly well documented.

But no matter how nice Flatpak seems to be, its overreliance on “portals” and “buses” and “seals” comes associated with trying to over-engineerize my system too much for its own good. Every app I have ever tried on Flatpak, for example, doesn’t support audio, apparently because I have the godly, eternal, battle-tested ALSA and not the manchild’s crap that is PulseAudio. But since apparently PulseAudio is the GNome / Microsoft approved way to do audio on Linux, I’m supposed expected to have it. What’s next? systemd-flatpakd?

OTOH, I picked up the AppImage for Freetube and not only do I get audio but it loads and runs noticeably faster than the Flatpak version. And since it’s an official release I know where can I trustably get an update from. Literally no downsides!

But I sure as hell am not going to go for an AppImage for an app from which I expect more integration with my desktop activity, such as say a code editor or an advanced image / model viewer. Not if I can help it. Because I am going to be expecting to be able to stuff like drag and drop, have a correct tray icon, etc.

So that means I have to keep an eye on both solutions.

Hey, at least I’m avoiding Snap!

Now if there’s an AppImage for Steam somewhere… maybe…

Removed by mod

I’ve seen nothing in the requirements that say that the designated person has to be reachable. If I had to set a fediverse instance of something, I’d just set the mailer inbox to /dev/null or smth to save storage. Or just subject the corpos to the same treatment they subject normal citizens,

Dear sender. Your request has been added to our queue for review - might not want a malintentioned party get through safety procedures, wouldn’t we? We know you understand us better than anyone. You may get a reply in a period from 48 to 72 days, our staff is very busy but we certainly have you in our hearts. God bless America, Heil Trump, and we’ll make the free software communists build the wall and pay for it! Cheers.

Oh no I do when it comes to that. The problem’s (usually) not there.

The problem mostly lies with distro packagers. They often ignore the “this dependency is optional” part and make the dependency mandatory. Back in the day Fedora was terrible at packaging new stuff (trying to remove PulseAudio would also try to remove Libreoffice, for example), nowadays it seems it’s Debian’s turn at the horribad packaging wheel. So in order to “use an alternative”, which would actually be the exact same software I’m already using except correctly compiled and packaged, I’d have to jump distros.

One notorious example is NetworkManager, which in Debian requires systemd for some weird-ass reason even tho you can run a correct Debian system without systemd. The Antix people compile it correctly, with systemd as optional / shim’d, but that means having to add Antix’s repo to Debian to use NetworkManager in Debian.

But hey, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.

Not when you are forced into it because it’s made a dependency of something you use.

That and the Gnome devs carry a lot of anti-consumer opinions and practices in particular since Gnome 3. Must be something to do with the Microsoft influence from around that time.

But their choices do impact other projects. I may not use Gnome, but the choices made on theming (or lack of) , for example, now also effect XFCE.

We’re on the same page then, as someone who says to go around involved in “multiple large Foss services” (no evidence to that) but that demands to be given freeloading on infrastructure by everyone else because otherwise Discord, well, is not really worth responding seriously to either.

I mean yeah I technically can’t offer the hosting without the authorization of my boss, but, ceteris paribus, how much are you offering?

a public space second.

Discord is NOT a public space.

Besides the privacy, Discord is also complicit in spam attacks against the Fediverse.

You don’t need to selfhost most of those. There’s IRC and webpage providers everywhere (you can literally walk into a cpanel hosting and click the button that says “make me a Wordpress”, for example). After all, I’m sure your product has an email account, yet you are not selfhosting your e-mail, do you? And you release your software via what, Github? Flatpak? Lemme see, are you selfhosting those too?

Although I’m a firm supporter of free software,

Lies, according to the rest of your very own post.

it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to

Discord literally doesn’t allow me to google (or DDG, or searx, or…) for solutions related to your software. How is that the right tool to use?

And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users.

Fallacy of popularity. If something is “”“inferior”“” simply because people have not been trained on them already, then by your definition Windows is superior to everything else. Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.

That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight,

Not with that attitude. That is, the one of a loser.

If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.

That would be true f people were literally doing that. But no, the stack of software that includes stuff like IRC, goode olde web forums, Stack Overflow-like webpages or friggin’ email has existed since the '80s and can be not by any reasonable metric be called “obscure” or “alternative” or “nobody’s heard of”.