I’ll start:
- RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
- XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
- IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
- Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
Not to mention how crappy the linux client is for linux users (I use one of those “thirdparty” clients myself, since the linux client is unbearable)
I’m hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.
Software, services come and go, so maybe, soon enough…
Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine
There are opt in bots in deveopment that allows individual servers to be indexed for search engine visibility
Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward…
It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.
trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
undefined> trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
I agree wholeheartedly, Discord is great for being a live chatroom, and for chatting over voice chat with friends, for any other purpose it is awful, and I am so baffled by so many product decisions to move to Discord. I feel like its a bunch of younger kids that played with their friends on it, and it has become the Hammer they use for every communication scenario, when most things are not nails.
Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.
Agree
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it’s a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they’ll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets. But I’m really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
The emerging immutable distros might be better positioned.
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don’t know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven’t. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Yeah, they could have taken the high road compared to Google and Amazon, but instead were like: Hold my beer. And don’t get me started on smartphones, “smart” TV’s and cars… Wonderful times we’re living in!
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it’s actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
Ah that’s probably how they’re able to squeeze Linux out of the market by having it OEM installed at cost.
Not that there are a lot of ordinary people who know what Linux is, much less desire to actively use it if it comes preinstalled on their machine.
@Skooshjones @privsecfoss @foss Also, another reason why big tech catches on, every time, is not so much that the UX is glossy but that Zoom, Apple, etc, all know that #Accessibility is needed to, 1, be dominant. As people look for stuff and tools that are accessible to Disabled users, Apple and Zoom come up a lot because they knew that capturing accessible design was a great way to capture a huge portion of users and otherwise. 2. Accessible design works for everybody. Seriously, having a far cleaner UI is better for everybody, including developers when they need to change code later.
I hope that this comes off as encouraging more than discouraging, but this lack of design and accessibility comes from the fact that it’s all volunteer work, and volunteers are going to prioritize what they need. The big companies don’t have smarter people working for them. They have money to spend on full-time developers (and designers, and writers, and…you get the idea) and someone at the top who wants to turn that investment into significantly more money by selling the software to people.
That’s a huge problem, because it puts up a wall between the people who do the work and people who just want to use the results of the work as the workers offered. And I don’t know how to fix that, other than to start making a bigger deal about the cultural aspects of Free Software. Like, a particular user may not care about how programmers develop the software, but by showing up and getting to know people, their one-off bug reports become something that people take seriously, because they know that person.
…But that obviously drifts further off topic.
Isn’t that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.
We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.
Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.
I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how “creative” various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.
It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.
Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?
Outlook
- hides email address => security issue; eases phishing (even beyond not showing whether it’s ensured valid)
- can’t have an inbox filter that moves emails and gives you a normal notification of unread email
- can’t have an inbox filter that is both server side and gives a desktop notification
- can’t save your reply email next to the replied to email in the inbox - but can in the folders
- can’t handle specific column orders (was it category before date then not working? sth like that)
I switched / had to switch at work. It works. I got used to it for the most part. But I’d much prefer using Thunderbird.
Because I’m using both now in both I never intuitively navigate to the delete button. Because the layout is different between the two.
Just wish it had native exchange activesync support, since we’re forced to use exchange accounts at work, and Microsoft no longer allows using M365 accounts directly via IMAP (you need to register applications in Azure that can instead use IMAP)
Stuck using BlueMail instead since it’s the only desktop client that mostly supports EAS. Aside from MailSpring but it had no calendar support despite being promised for years.
Can’t use Outlook since I’m on Linux and running a VM for it is a bit heavy. And I can’t stand outlook web.
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS’ map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.
I think this is more of a problem of knowing when a specific tool should be used. Probably most people familiar with hadoop are aware of all the overhead it creates. At the same time you hit a point in dataset sizes (I guess even more with “real time” data processing) where it’s not even feasible with a single machine. (at the same time I’m not too knowledgeable about hadoop and bigdata, so anyone else feel free to chime in)
Rings a bell. Will check it out. Looks good at first glance.
It’s hard to beat GIMP.
Better than photoshop 1000x times
Hard to do anything with GIMP.
Jk
Kinda.
I’ve found that Krita is pretty easy to use and does most of the things I would otherwise have to use Photoshop for.
My kid uses krita with a drawing tablet, something I’m honestly not sure is even possible with gimp.
As much as I want to love it, the UX oh the UX
Seriously considering paying $10/mo for Photoshop just so I can replace my gimp with being encombured with bloat.
Check out Photopea
Agree on RSS.
Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.
The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.
Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Part of my rexxit so far has included me dusting off newsreaders and rss feeds again.
Im trying to find a good set up. Newsblur seems to be a front runner. I have nextcloud selfhosted, so I could use that with the $2.99 android app or I could pay for newsblur or feedly a few bucks each month.
Either way, having a self-curated feed of news these last few days has been pretty amazing. There is no algorithm tuned for engagement pumping news in my face. It’s just stories, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts that I want to see (on my terms).
Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.
What’s your setup? How do you aggregate different feeds to one page? Where do you find the feeds? I have so many RSS questions - everyone who uses it loves it and I want to understand it.
I use Feeder for Android and view everything from there. Notifies me of new posts. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
For like reddit I do https://teddit.net/r/[subreddit]?api&type=rss
For twitter I do https://nitter.net/[username]/rss
Can display things in groups or all together. Lists them chronologically. No need for an account. No need to visit the site.
Reddit kinda replaced that for me. With leaving Reddit, just today I’ve installed a rss feed reader on my laptop and phone.
That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.
Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.
As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.
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IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays
peoplecommunities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
I literally can not think of anything software wise, especially FOSS as I use the command line a lot and those tools and concepts go back decades. Being a retro computer geek I can list a ton of old proprietary systems or software that I consider perfectly usable.
Oh wait, I just thought of one: RiscOS Open. The best OS for ARM besides Linux, all my Pi’s run on it and it natively uses BBC BASIC, although not Free as in Freedom BBC BASIC, or even BASIC in general is a programming language that has a lot to offer.
Although not software I think the biggest thing I have in mind would be Optical Media. Most consider it obsolete, even against data tape, but I use it extensively precisely because it has features no other media possesses (ignoring LTO tape). Featurea such as many decades of longevity, cheapness (even today it’s cheaper than equivalent sized flash media) and above all it’s the only media that has read only properties.
SSD’s, HDD’s are not close to archival grade, only optical and tape (ignoring film and the ultimate archival media, vellum) are.
All my data that must be recovered at all costs is archived to BD-R, which in turn is backed up to LTO tape, which in turn is backed up into the cloud. Both the bd-r and LTO tape are written and finished days before the data has been uploaded to the cloud! Because my upload speed is 20Mb/s maximum the old SCSI LTO 4 drive writing to tape at 60MB/s wipes the floor with it, the bd-r records much slower than that but still is done in a fraction of the time.
Maybe if I’m ever able to get 1Gb upload bandwidth I’ll use the cloud more, but at the moment it’s running at a slower speed than my first 486 with it’s 210MB HDD!
Edit: Ah! Wait, I forgot to mention Window Maker. I use Window Maker as my window manager. Works like a charm and hasn’t changed in looks one bit since the 90’s
In light of recent IBM/RH activity those keeping the old ways, and user choice, alive are more important than ever.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:NeddySeagoon/YeOldeGentoo_2021_Edition
Alsa may be a bit awkward but the other stuff is just more chaos on top of it, it’s not an alternative.
I try wayland once a year or so, maybe one year I will manage more than a few hours or days.
lvm/luks/ext4 is still better than btrfs which still hasn’t gotten round to addressing encryption, big hopes for bcachefs.
Sftp. At work we are switching to api and it sucks in comparison. Even it works its great but when it doesn’t its harder to fix than sftp.
XMPP is very underappreciated.
On paper it was great, but in practice no one implemented it fully and while I don’t know why it is probably complicated.
Jabber was the way to go 10+ years ago but than everything stopped since no one managed to make clients for voice and video chat, than we just all dropped it.
I would call it big fail since it didn’t manage to materialize in usable form.
On the other hand, it is never too late to make new better protocol based on xmmp for modern times.
xmpp has clients doing voice and video - it has for years. It is p2p and falls over in some nat to nat situations, which is where stun/turn come in on the server. Check out jmp.chat - they built a voip phone service using xmpp clients.
I know they exists, but never got to the usability point we need.m, or even if it did it was too late.
If a sizable chunk of the Reddit community can move to an alpha/beta grade link aggregator platform that can’t handle the load because we believe in the decentralization or the instance’s mission or the overall concept of federation, why is it too late for the community to re-adopt a mature messaging platform that mirrors those ambitions?
Because messaging of that sort needs contacts and Redditors (including me tbf) don’t have friends.
