The problem with replacing Discord isn’t the tech or features. Discord doesn’t do anything special that hasn’t existed in other software for 15-20 years.

The key difficulty is overcoming the network effect. All the big streamers use Discord, which means their millions of viewers are going to use Discord also, which means that most of their friends will too, and thus, you have a default app that almost everybody uses.

It took a massive amount of effort for me to just get three of my friends to sign up with Matrix and join a group server for gaming, and two of them stopped using it after just a month or two. I only have a single friend who is still using it, and they only use it when the two of us are gaming.

Yeah, but think of the potential shareholder value!

…allowing paying customers to generate solar power, grow crops and replace urban lighting.

What a great idea! There aren’t any other ways to generate or store solar power, grow crops beyond daytime hours, or create good urban lighting…

Buying my copy soon!

Magic Earth has been great to use 🙂

This will become more and more true in more and more cases as time goes on.

Linux is built on a far more efficient kernel, and the culture of Linux development is very much the same.

Meanwhile Microsoft will continue to enshitify its projects, shove more AI garbage onto its users, and prioritize profits over everything else.

Linux has been the standard OS for decades in the low power computing space, Microsoft can’t compete.

I hate that this is me…

Voyager user here, just some general bugginess. It’s not bad, but sometimes weird stuff happens, like when I minimize the app on my phone and then switch back, the main toolbar is misaligned.

True, it still does vary even chipset to chipset. Some Nvidia and Intel cards do just work depending on the distro, others require more work.

It also depends on how “techie” the user is. My parents are 0% techie, so I have to do anything and everything for them if they have questions or issues.

But a Windows power user can handle some terminal use and other basic system modifications. And honestly now days, most of that stuff is super easy. Like Linux mint has a dedicated driver app that allows you to use a simple GUI to install Nvidia drivers, it’s super easy.

Hard to summarize, because it differs so much from person to person.

I installed Linux on my parent’s computer. They don’t need to know anything about Linux, because everything they use is identical to their old Windows PC. They click the icon for Chrome to open the browser. They Click the icon for LibreOffice to type up a “Word” doc and print it by clicking “file > print”

As far as they’re concerned, they are still using Windows.

For a gamer, they will need to know a little about Proton, possibly Lutris and the Hero launcher. They might need to know about installing nVidia drivers or tweaking a few things in the Steam launch options to get games to run better.

It’s tough to know exactly what a new Linux user will “need” to know in order to use Linux.

Aegis for time codes, Nitrokey for physical 2FA tokens.

In all seriousness, I’ve yet to encounter a situation where Systemd made any meaningful negative difference in my Linux experience.

I’ve never had problems with any init system, Systemd or otherwise.

The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.

You don’t need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.

Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.

Fair point, I thought Proton went back farther than that.

I think my overall point is right still though, Linux gaming (native or otherwise) has become not just viable, but in some cases objectively superior to gaming on Windows in terms of raw performance. Pretty amazing, and in even less time than I originally thought lol.

Systemd is great! The best thing about it is how efficient and minimal it is!

Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always “right around the corner.”

All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.

When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

So it’s certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it’s genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.

I’m very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.

You mean relying blindly on a statistical prediction engine to attempt to produce sophisticated software without any understanding of the underlying principles or concepts doesn’t magically replace years of actual study and real-world experience?

But trust me, bro, the singularity is imminent, LLMs are the future of human evolution, true AGI is nigh!

I can’t wait for this idiotic “AI” bubble to burst.

Of course he does, it’s Capitalism, which will always incentivize firms to get as many people as possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.

well, I work in IT. So I am required to use apps like Teams for mobile and DUO 2FA in order to authenticate my laptop sessions.

Now, could I use only SMS/email 2FA? Technically yes. And I could just have Teams on my work laptop and have that nearby all the time, but it would be extremely inconvenient. Navigation would also be a big problem. Due to the nature of my job, I frequently have to visit a large number of different sites around my area. Having to open my laptop each time I need to go somewhere, open up a map site like OSM or Google maps to get the directions, print them off or write them down, then follow them manually hoping that I don’t encounter random slowdowns or closures in an area I am not familiar with is basically a non-starter for me.

As for personal use, navigation rears its ugly head again. I often will be traveling with friends or family and we decide on a whim to change our destination for dinner or hangouts after based on times, appetites, budgets, closures, etc. Having a map app on my phone makes that easy to do. It would be impossible to do that without it, unless I had a near exhaustive knowledge of my whole city and surrounding suburbs.

Honestly navigation is the #1 thing. Random other stuff comes up, like my mobile password manager Bitwarden, or my various apps like my City’s bus/metro app, and my city’s parking app. Both of which again, I could make do without, but it would be extremely tough and inconvenient.

I’ve decided that the happy medium for me is to use as much FOSS phone tech as possible. That way at least the tracking and data harvesting is minimized and I am generally not supporting megacorps.

I use GrapheneOS, with mostly FOSS apps. The proprietary apps I do use are isolated with GOS’s special sauce. I use Magic Earth for my navigation, which while not open source, the data sets they use are, and they are not google, and based in the EU, so far better privacy than Google’s trash.

I wish I could switch to a flip phone, I’ve seriously considered it many times over the last several years. But for my lifestyle, it’s just not feasible. The best balance for me is to compute ethically on my mobile. I have thought about going for the weekend with just a dumb phone, that might be possible, but I’ll have to see.

Here’s my definition of cheating: The use of any 3rd party software, not allowed by the developer, that gives a material in-game advantage to the user against other players without their knowledge or consent.

So mods are not cheating. Purely single player hacks are not cheating. Optional 3rd party overlays or in-game aids like RuneLite for OSRS or the many external deck/stat trackers for games like Hearthstone or Genshin Impact also aren’t cheating.

Using Aimbots, wall hacks, infinite health/ammo/lives, and similar in online comp play is cheating.

Grey zone stuff would be things like unapproved in-game overlays.

I don’t care what people do in single player. Hack and mod as much as your heart desires, it doesn’t hurt any other players. The worst thing that can happen is you “cheat” yourself out of a personal challenge, but that’s your own call.