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

Self-hosters are also subject to DMCA. Failure to comply runs the risk of being sued.

Not if the self-hoster is self-hosting out of DMCA jurisdiction. Also, not if the self-hoster can not be found (say, redirect your mailer to /dev/null).

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.

Actually I do; it’s the {} that initializes the lambda, and the parenthesis after invokes.

That said, it would have been fun.

Maximum optimization!

C:

Problem → return Solution;

C++:

Problem →

const [auto]&& (Problem&& problem) noexcept(noexcept( Solution<Problem>{}(std::forward<Problem>(problem)) )) { return Solution<Problem>{}(std::forward<Problem>(problem)); } -> decltype( Solution<Problem>{}(std::forward<Problem>(problem)) )

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”.

It’s incredible, yes, even more considering that Discord has been complicit on spam attacks on the Fediverse.

is the fact that participation requires yet another account.

You can literally connect most active forum engines to eg.: OpenID, XMPP, email or any/most kinds of online identifiers. Worst case scenario you can literally enable “sign in with Google”.

Sure, I literally do this for my work. How much are you offering me?

No idea if that’s the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the “Icaza pest”, trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that “users have no right to change their settings” when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it’d interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.

Xfree? Who’s talking about that? I’ve only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its “”““modern””“” replacement Wayland doesn’t even start a full desktop session on my machine)

No, we’re talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (/dev/snd or something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I… think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven’t delved enough to check.

Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.

I don’t know what universe were you living in, but I remember history vastly differently. No app I ever used ever had problems with ALSA, not even gaming. XMMS or XMMS2 (or Audacious even back then when it was kinda starting) never had issues with Firefox. Only when PA was introduced I started losing audio on various apps, losing volume control, or in a few cases apps would cease listing ALSA as a possible audio output while PA was installed.

I killed PA on my machines hard and never had any issues again, and things pretty much only improved once Pipewire arrived other than having to change one (1) configuration file, and it was properly documented.