To say it was written in Rust & make it someone’s portfolio piece so they can use a Microsoft GitHub link on their Microsoft LinkedIn profile.

There are so many gaming options that do run well on Linux that I just don’t bother with with those that don’t. More fish in the sea…

I want to see good forges for alternative DVCSs. Git itself feels like legacy software full a truckload of arcane commands & flags with bad defaults that just keeps bloating. Most software makers at this point have never even used a non-Git VCS.

XMPP > Matrix | Slack | Telegram

Seems more a rejects of the flamboyance of the prior two generation which will certainly give it a different feel. It absolutely felt fresh at the time of inception.

Google services I still use before being unGoogled:

1. Voice: I have to make like 1 or 2 calls within the US a year & not worth a SIM
2. Maps: for when OSM isn’t cutting it & I’ll contribute the missing data after I found it
3. Translate: for when Yandex Translate doesn’t cut it (everything ‘free’ only works with European languages)
4. YouTube: no real alternative here that isn’t limited to just a piece of its scope, but viewed thru Librewolf+uBlock Origin+SponsorBlock or PipePipe

… and the last one is just basically every employer I have worked with puts all their company data on Google & it can’t really be avoided with them >:(

XMPP is an extensible protocol that has over a decade of battle testing from the casual chat to massive industrial communications applications (Zoom, Jitsi, almost certainly any online game you’ve played). It has E2EE in modern clients. It’s decentralized by nature & relatively easy to self-host. Both servers & clients use very few resources like bandwidth, storage, processing, memory (consider conditions of the time of invention). It doesn’t take minutes to join & sync chatrooms (MUCs). Gateways allow folks to talk across non-XMPP platforms. Governance is distributed in the open & not tied to a single entity. There are even projects like Snikket that can be rolled out for a family that is close to turn-key for set up. Along with something like Movim can create a self-hosted social network built atop an XMPP server for posts to share stories & media for a longer-term storage.

If E2EE encryption isn’t seen as a must relying on TLS + self-hosting: lighter, simpler IRC (good feature set with v3) which has been around since the ’80s can be a good choice. Zulip which is a forum/chat platform that has the most usable UX for trying to actually hybridize both (it’s not amazing UX, but better than the rest); this can work for a great for certain communities that desire this behavior.

Distributed (not to be confused with decentralized) encrypted chat there is Briar with a mesh network not even requiring internet, but has limited platform support & last I used years ago had massive battery drain issues.

If you must, there is Matrix which decentralized & offers E2EE but is relatively expensive to run from the clients, to servers, to the design generally being that it replicates the room messages & attachments & state across all servers for all users. While that duplicated data is great for resilience, can be expensive to store & is what takes minutes to join any room. I think it was a design decision ‘miss’ to try copy Slack/Discord/Telegram-but-FOSS as doing too much & none of it that well--where I think chat is better to be a bit simpler + expected to be ephemeral & a different service like a forum for important, permanent discussions & FAQs. Mastodon suffers similar issues with replication that makes some have to shutdown their self-host due to cost--which has led to Matrix in practice centralizing around Matrix[dot]org (who has a history of Israeli intelligence funding) & the servers they provide to others funneling all the metadata thru their org since they offer free accounts, are big enough to scale, & have most of the users. Folks act like Matrix is great just for being newer, but the aforementioned already cover its uses while being more mature.

Signal & WhatsApp are not secure enough. Meta/Facebook regularly give data & metatadata to the cops & Signal is centralized & not self-hosted by your crew so while messages are encrypted, the metadata still isn’t. If you must use Signal, I would pick Molly as an Android client since you can a) encrypt the messages under a separate password for storage on seizure & b) you can use the UnifiedPush version to make sure your notification metadata isn’t going thru Google’s Firebase servers. Protests are the ideal place for Briar as it is works via mesh net so internet & SIM cards are not required (but years ago wden I tried it, the app was a major battery drainer).

more popular

That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server. Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.

More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.

I like seeing the Krita suggestion, but to just call it “open-source” with no clarification on that means would lead me to believe kids would skip over the hyphenated adjective without realizing it is often the key to finding other good, open-source software (e.g. a “open-source alternative to Reddit” query should lead one to Lemmy). I’m hoping it has a section or callout or even a vocab word on another page but I’m skeptical.

(This is putting aside my quarrels with OSI, FSF, SPDX for the larger picture)

Want to contribute to this open project? Create closed Microsoft GitHub & Discord account. https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html

Rufus

Create bootable USB drives the easy way

You can use it to flash an ISO for a free operating system instead Microsoft Windows spyware. You could go Linux, or BSD, or Haiku, or whatever so long as your personal data & freedom are respected.