I’m not too sure, I didn’t look terribly deeply on that front since that’s not something my group uses often, and its difficult to test on my own. That said, I believe Matrix does have some level of voice chat support, though AFAIK its more similar to Skype’s calls than Discord’s drop-in/drop-out voice channels. No idea about XMPP though.

I belive just Matrix and XMPP.

From my digging on alternatives the main contenders are (in no particular order)

• Stoat
  • Essentially 1:1 on discords format
  • UK based, so its future there is uncertain
  • Infrastructure is lacking, was crippled by the initial influx after discord’s announcement.
  • Missing some minor UI and UX features, feels unpolished.
• Spacebar
  • Reverse engineered discord
  • Greatest potential, IMO, but as of a few days ago all it has is potential.
  • lacks significant client development, relying on an external client named Fermi, which feels quite amateurish.
• XMPP
  • Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn’t look too deep at it.
• Matrix
  • IMO the most likely discord successor.
  • Minor functional hiccups, that vary from client to client
  • Of the clients I tested, Cinny is the most discord like, but I hear commet is closer.
  • Nested spaces provides the minimum format equivalence.
• Fluxer
  • Slightly sus vibes
  • Lacks self hosting instructions
  • Media is non-permanent, which is I guess fair to keep infra costs down, but its unsuitable for my groups media usage habits.
  • Looks promising, but I’ve not actually tried it given the lack of self hosting instructions.

One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links, server side channel ordering, and space membership over channel membership. But that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

EDIT: Forgot Fluxer. Added.

Where are you getting three years of abandonment from? The branding repo OP linked was last updated 10 months ago, while the server repo appears to have had pretty steady development for the last month at least (as far back as I bothered checking on mobile)

Bruno has telemetry users can’t opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337

Which is misguided if not evil. Unnaceptable either way, IMO.

Bruno has telemetry users can’t opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337

Which, IMO, is unacceptable.

Unfortunately most people don’t really have a choice in the matter. It’s sites like twitter that crunch images to hell and back on upload that choose for us.

They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.

Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?

Absolutely not. Power companies don’t get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.

IMO Arch’s defaults (especially w.r.t. audio and fonts) are a little nicer than Gentoo’s, but that’s a pretty minor inconvenience all things considered.

The ability to patch packages with little effort ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/patches ) is the main reason I’m currently considering switching to gentoo.

There are valid criticism to be made about cosmic desktop, like

*Lists two positives*

If that’s the best example of criticism to be had about COSMIC, then it’s practically flawless. Except of course, though, it isn’t. Aside from the general lack of polish, I’d argue that there’s not enough customization. E.g. things that should really be a slider or spin control (or better yet multiple sliders/spin controls) like corner radii are multiple choice button things (not to mention that the ‘square’ style is anything but.) Some of the sliders that do exist (particularly the size ones) have very few set points that make them essentially disguised drop downs. I could probably find dozens more things to criticize if I cared to sit down and nitpick everything.

C++ is pretty alright, IMO, but the syntax is kinda clunky though, I think probably because of some historical baggage.

As much as I sympathise with developers over headaches caused by themeing, I believe users (myself included) would be less up-in-arms about it if applications were less ugly by default. And boy howdy is libadwaita ugly as sin.

I’d be perfectly willing to tolerate a mismatched system, if the individual components looked at least okay. Like I’m not going to get e.g. steam or discord to match an e.g. Windows 9x theme, and I’m mostly okay with that because they aren’t horrible to look at. But, say, File Roller? Absolutely not. Horribly ugly.

A program that I use often uses an embedded MPV window for video playing, and Wayland doesn’t support that, and apparently won’t: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/74

So until something changes with that program, MPV, or Wayland, or I decide to rewrite the program myself, I’m stuck with X11.

Ah. I’ve only ever used a Mac like once ever, and that was over a decade ago. However that does sound pretty close to what I’d do, something like /programs, /libraires , /config, /data, and /users.

Nope, btw.

Personally I quite like zstd, I find it has a pretty decent balance of speed to ratio at each of its levels.

Definitely. As nice as it would be, I don’t think it will significantly change any time soon, for several reasons. Not least of which is because several programs would likely just flatly refuse to implement such a change, judging by some of them refusing to even consider patches to implement the XDG Base Directory Specification.

Not really software but, personally I think the FHS could do with replacing. It feels like its got a lot of historical baggage tacked on that it could really do with shedding.