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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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…












  • 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”.