Fuck discord.
What alternative would you suggest if I just want to talk to my mates while gaming? I gave up on setting up TeamSpeak after like an hour and many crashes and errors. I was a TeamSpeak fan for many years when using windows, but on Linux I highly dislike it.
I wish they would work on proper voice channels like discord has. The whole ‘meeting room’ zoom call style thing is obnoxious to use, and the screen sharing has so much lag.
There are “Video Rooms”. They’re in beta too.
Also, screen sharing is done via the same platform agnostic web APIs every other Electron-based app uses, though.
I got rid of screen capture induced lag by switching to Wayland.The screen capture isn’t the issue, encoding the stream is where discord manages to do it with only a second or so of latency. Jitsi and similar seem to have much longer delays.
There is “broadcasting” in element/ schildichat. Is that the same?
There’s no lag on my end, might be server/ connection dependent
If you just want to talk, mumble would be a very lightweight alternative.
i just got matrix up and running. its a federated ommunications specification. id invite you to mine but im still ironing things out. check out https://www.matrix.org
Does matrix have voice chat, video chat?
It has an integration with Jitsi.
It has a native implementation for 1 to 1 calls and group calls is currently in beta for the Element client.
ive yet to test it myself but it seems to support voice and video
Nope.
it didnt even take that long to look, why lie?
It has Jitsi integration, have they added something else finally?
Not yet but it’s being worked on and it’s close now
Mumble (is comoletely free software and has a better quality even than teamspeak)
And requires setting up and managing a server, which costs time and money and requires a certain degree of expertise. Also it can’t really be used as a primary chat app, so you still have to use another app for that. It also doesn’t support features like livestreams so that’s another application you may need.
Mumble is your best bet for an actual gaming voice chat setup.
There is a pretty similar looking and function called Revolt that could be useful for getting people that are used to Discord to switch. I think they also have a long goal of being able to send and receive messages and calls with Discord. Obviously they don’t have that atm, but it is open-source and nice to at least know about in the event a quick exodus of Discord is needed.
Guilded is a much better alternative. Gives you all the Nitro stuff for free. But ultimately is a for-profit company owned by
MSRoblox so it’s destined for the same shitty fate in the future. Their monetization model is more like Patreon where people pay to support their favorite communities.Matrix is another one but its incredibly slow and incredibly lacking in features and not nearly as private as it’s made out to be.
Best case scenario you can self-host rocket.chat
In my eyes that makes it even worse
Yeah sorry, I’m misremembering.
Use a different homeserver for matrix and it’s way faster then the default matrix.org one for the element clients servers joinmatrix.org is a good list
I’ve tried a bunch, they’re all slow. I’m optimistic about Matrix 2.0 but haven’t tested it yet.
Did you try the TeamSpeak 5 beta client? It uses CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) I think so it should be pretty platform agnostic. You can join TS3 servers with it just fine :)
Why?
Idk about them, but it’s a centralized, locked-down service that absorbs and holds information and data hostage like tomorrow.
As someone who’s trying to completely avoid Discord, it’s quite frustrating how many communities and projects will put important information in their Discords, and nowhere else. You have to have an account to see it, and it also isn’t searchable in a search engine. It is actually quite terrible for pretty much everyone.
Element/Matrix lets you peek into public chats and servers/spaces without an account, so it can definitely be done. They won’t do it though, because they gotta make you feel dat FOMO lol.
I mean cool, but good luck convincing the vast majority of users leaving Discord for Matrix.
This development is beneficial for the Linux gaming ecosystem, proprietary be damned.
I can acknowledge all that and still say fuck discord. I never mentioned herding everyone over, I just explained why I think it’s a parasite and why I have a strong disliking towards it.
Don’t need the majority. The majority is not even interested in these communities. The ones that are, are likely proponents of FOSS themselves and should (in theory) switch over.
All you have to do is bridge the two together and have the Matrix one shown more prominently.
Do you expect your average Discord user to bother going through such hoops?
Sorry. What I meant was that the project maintainers should do that, so the Discord users can use Discord but Matrix is still the main option.
Project leaders?
Matrix is a better platform for realtime communication, but it has the same issue with needing an account and being difficult to search. Any discussions that take place on Discord or Matrix will be fleeting, as it prioritizes only the most recent discussion in the chat. Thus making long form discussions about particular topics impossible.
All technical discussions should be archived on a searchable forum. If you are using a source forge like GitHub and GitLab, then public discussions should take place there. There’s no better place for discussions and questions about code than in the same place where the code is hosted itself. Platform integrations make it very easy to associate discussions to commits and merge requests.
While not ideal, even hosted forum platforms like Lemmy and Reddit are still better than using a chat client. If only to serve as a platform for broader public discussions and questions. People are more likely to already have a Lemmy or Reddit account than they are to have a GitHub or GitLab account.
I do agree Discord shouldn’t be used as a Gitlab issue tracker, yet development teams still insists on continuing this practice.
Based
Old electron version (meaning no screensharing on wayland), really buggy linux application, no encryption, poorly enforced rules and policies, micro transactions… Honestly, the linux version of discord is so terrible that I’ve been running it from a web browser for the last month or so, it’s genuinely much better lol
Yesterday they enabled monitoring of all messages in their servers. It was obvious before, but now they are getting even more 1984. Communities should migrate as soon as possible.
I believe it, but citation(s) please?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6AlbG2ZoKs
They were already scanning every message and DM for data tracking and whatnot to sell anyway, the only difference now is they’re using it for TOS violations.
Privacy-wise nothing has changed, but actual consequences for actually bad things like racism / transphobia / csam / etc. is good. The only real issue is what if they decide that sharing a music file is piracy and now your account is penalized? What about uploading an NES ROM to a friend via a DM? Or sharing a link to an anime piracy website?
It’s the kind of thing that has to be a balance between making sure users aren’t doing stuff that is strictly against Discord’s rules, but also about making a good-faith attempt to limit things that can get Discord themselves in trouble from companies who are becoming more and more aware that Discord has been used as a piracy-safe haven for quite some time now. (Like how they’re limiting their “using discord upload URLs like your own CDN” issue last month.)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=U6AlbG2ZoKs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This news is notable because a mainstream proprietary software publisher has chosen to officially distribute using Flathub. I couldn’t care less about Discord, but it says a lot about Flathub’s mindshare. Proprietary publishers tend to pick AppImage, but this is the first publisher I know of that has chosen Flathub instead. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend.
That being said, Cassidy obviously had a very active hand in convincing Discord to adopt the Flatpak package.
There is also bitwig with an official flatpak
So it does! I didn’t know that. Admittedly, I don’t actually use that much proprietary software on Linux-based systems, so my knowledge is limited. It’d be interesting if Lightworks or DaVinci Resolve were one day distributed with Flatpak, although Blackmagic Design believes Flatpak can’t handle DaVinci Resolve’s needs.
But hey, a community-built Flatpak for Resolve exists already.
Plex desktop is also only on flathub.
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But OBS is exactly the type of thing you’d expect to find on Flathub. What you don’t usually find is any sort of mainstream software. I can’t even get official Proton releases on Flathub.
It is! And OBS is awesome. But it is not proprietary.
screenshare with audio when
When they decide to use Electron that’s not 5 major versions out of date, but that’s not happening
I will never not hate Javascript. I hate all web dev nonsense. What a huge mess that all is.
Javascript itself is not the issue. You can have horrible code written in any language, and this is exactly what this is. The management behind Discord are sinking the company
Here we see the average JS hater, unaware of that which they criticize. Luckily, a new framework will be released before the coming winter to provide them with sustenance.
They’re already using an Electron version that supports audio sharing iirc, they just default to their custom implementation which doesn’t work on Linux
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I’ll check it out. I use
discord-screenaudiomyself.
You could route your desktop audio into your mic, with the big downside thst the other party wont be able to control the volume independently.
I found
discord-screenaudioto be a better solution.
They haven’t updated their website yet. It still says to download the deb package or tar.gz package. No mention of the flatpak.
Hopefully they update it at some point.
I hope Discord won’t become the go to app for Linux gamers, when Linux becomes the go to OS for gaming ( one can dream right ! )
I mean it already is, Linux gamers play with their windows/mac friends. The alternatives aren’t as easy to use.
Based on what I understand, the feature people use Discord for is “group voice chat”, but other people on this thread r saying, future Element X can do that, and Mumble can also do that… How easy they are compared to Discord ? Idk, but I know that It literally sucks all your data, just so it can tell you : person X is playing game Y…
I just remembered Revolt aims to be an exact copy of Discord, it’s Foss and chats are E2EE I guess
Group voice is discord’s biggest feature, but also general messaging (both direct/group as well as communities), video streaming, and file sharing.
Element might be a viable alternative, I’ve used it for chat where it certainly is, I haven’t used voice but I’ve heard some people say that video has a very high delay. My friends and I will often share screens for one reason or another and I’m not sure that the experience would be comparable in Element yet.
Mumble isn’t comparable because it doesn’t implement any of the same features other than voice, it doesn’t have persistant logins, etc.
Discord is going to stay king in terms of queer community as long as it’s the only chat app with Pluralkit. My polycule can’t use anything else.
Don’t take it for granted, technology moves fast, apps get out-featured, but whether they get mass adoption, that’s another matter
This is the Linux community, people here changed their entire OS, for various reasons or sometimes no reason at all ( just because they can ), so they’ll drop Discord in a heartbeat once another app becomes usable and as funky…
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to moving off Discord. The username change made the biggest difference to me, I lost the last of my trust in them to keep making user friendly decisions at that moment. But regardless of trust, my polycule needs a tool to differentiate headmates, and Discord is the only platform that has that so far. I know because I’ve looked. We’ll switch when a pluralkit equivalent is available
If you must use discord for some reason use the web version in librewolf
I use the web version in Vivaldi, I’ve always had issues with video calls in Gecko.
There’s a Flatpak version that’s specifically intended to be more private. I have no idea how well it does that but functionally it works fine, so that’s what I’ve used for a while.
just so people are aware:
third party clients are against Discord’s ToS. with that out of the way, looks really cool and I’ll give it a try!
Meeh, Void has it in the packages, but I don’t use it, too confusing for a messaging app if you ask me.
If you haven’t been forced into it by your friends/communities, then definitely avoid it if you can
Yeah, it was for a game, but I just said f it, too confusing for me.
Too confusing? How so?
You got servers… I mean, if I wanted something IRC like, I’d be using IRC.
And then there’s the left pane which I found totally confusing, had no idea what was going on there, notifications kept popping up, there was nothing in those chats or servers or whatever, and then there were ads, and… fuck, just too much noise for something that’s supposed to be fun…
Huh?
So, first of all, Discord doesn’t have ads. Second of all, what, since IRC had servers in 1862 then no other chat platform can ever have them?
I will say the notifications can be a bit annoying. There’s a setting to turn off the notifications, and one to turn off just the sounds, in the Notifications and Sounds categories in the settings, and I’d recommend to turn both off.
By “left pane” do you mean the channels? Basically, Discord lets you create different servers which contain groups of people and channels. Within each server, there’s a list of text and voice channels (and now forum channels) to talk about different things.
Discord can’t do much about there not being much in the servers you’re in, if nobody sends any messages then you won’t find any.
Maybe it was ads from the game, IDK… cuz I think we were on their server.
I’m just used to chat rooms being more IRC like, that’s all… this thing is supposed to be more advanced, but it was just more confusing for me.
Yeah, that part was confusing to me… like how can I create a “server” on their server 🤨… we’re all basically on the same server, just in a different “virtual server” 🤔 🤷… IDK, it never made sense to me, cuz creating a server means something completely different in my mind, not just “right click --> new server”.
Maybe I’m just old, IDK. In the end, we switched to Viber, one chat, simple, elegant, everyone had it instaled, end of story.
Within each server, there’s a list of text and voice channels (and now forum channels) to talk about different things.
Yeah, this was also confusing. I mean… come on, I’m not creating a freaking community here, we’re just discussing some shit from the game and having some fun from time to time, sharing memes and jokes, stuff like that, nothing serious, like that chat will be dead in a year (everyone migrates to another state in the end in the game), so why bother building this giant community, when everything will die down in a year or so anyway.
Just way too complex for the thing we needed. Basic chat features, image/video sharing, that was all that was needed… servers, channels, communities… just way too much noise and clutter. I can understand the appeal for people that game 24/7, but I don’t so, digging into this, just so that i can write “get to x:y coords and destroy this fucker” or share a screenshot… I mean… it just wasn’t worth my time.
Yeah, Discord servers are really meant for communities more than for being a group chat (although you can make group chats with up to ten people). Totally fair if multiple channels and stuff are more than you need.
Agreed. I keep trying to use it because that’s where Opensim’s Metaverse Alliance landed when Google Groups shut down, but it’s way too noisy. I wish they’d just settled on a proper forum site like Delphi.
Isn’t it in xbps-src? IIRC the Void guys don’t want to package things that don’t have a blanket redistributable clause in their license.
Yeah, my mistake, xbps-src… they might even have it in the repo repackaged, not sure, though it was in src only back when I installed it.
Yeah, I know that. They got permission for Vivaldi some time ago (like a year ago I think), so that’s great, I just love Vivaldi ☺️.
I was also working on some old niche wares, like Nero 10 for Linux and some other packages long out of date, but still work. They wouldn’t include them, so I might just put the templates on github or codeber.
Meanwhile neither Element nor Schildichat or Fluffychat are official.
FYI There are also open source discord clients available:
- Discordo is a nice CLI to use Discord
- ArmCord: Full Open Source Discord client with themes, etc.
- gtkcord4 & gtkcord 3: Both are simple GTK Clients for Discord
Third party clients are against Discord’s terms of service, so use at your own risk.
Nice!
Now I’ve just got to work out why mine has suddenly started crashing on startup with GPU errors.
dont know what happened to it, but today its a 404 page https://flathub.org/apps/com.discordapp.Discord
