Awesome. I've been using FUTO keyboard for two years now and it's the best free & private keyboard I found, but swiping has been really bad for all these keyboards which was such a pain because I use swiping a lot.
Nice to see the hour of swiping I did adding to their dataset actually helped. I'm using it now and it feels as good as the Google keyboard.
Edit: It is sending me a little that it keeps swiping "whats" instead of "what's" though, hopefully they fix that later.
I'll look for a video. I like swyping because I can hold the phone in one hand and swipe with the thumb. The other hand is free. Two finger swiping would negate that advantage but maybe it opens up other usage scenarios.
I'm sorry, once you've tried it you may not be able to go back. For close to a decade have been using an unmaintained app called nintype that was apparently the inventor of two finger swipe until it stopped working on new android versions... Heliboard saved me from actual despair
Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...
Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem, even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you cannot change it for that project again.
Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.
I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.
>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.
I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.
I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers
Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.
Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)
> Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers
Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.
The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.
I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.
All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.
When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).
Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers
From personal experience, yes. Most of my friends are part of multiple large servers, often interacting with a small subsets of these communities. At this point, I don't think there is a comparable alternative.
My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.
I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems worth doing. Personally I use a mix of IRC, XMPP, and Matrix, mostly IRC (internet people) and Matrix (IRL friends/family), though. I believe XMPP and Matrix both have some sort of voice or video chat support across some clients and servers, but if someone were to try to call me through them, it would seem "weird" to say the least. I usually get people on Mumble if we're gonna play a game and want a voice chat going. It's rock-solid, everyone I play games with seems fine with it. When we're done voice chatting, we close Mumble, a bit like hanging up a phone call.
As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.
The private servers I'm in always have a few people screen sharing whenever a voice chat is active. They're either sharing their gameplay (semi-privately, hence no Twitch) or they're co-watching movies. Oh and every so often, screen sharing is used for getting someone's opinion on image editing or a song in they're making. I've also given people remote tech support which is way easier to do when their screen is visible.
But it's worth noting that as an older Gen Z, this is just how people hang out nowadays, so we'll be watching anime together in the server until we fall asleep or whatever. That's why screen sharing isn't as useful as screenshots and video clips.
The benefit of one big app is a consistent identity. Seeing that an account was created years ago, and how long it's been a member of the current server, helps identify spam and scams. When a user you're familiar with provides a link to another Discord server, its more trustworthy.
Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.
You can use as many different apps for yourself but good luck sustaining a community/team/org that requires learning 5 apps for participation, especially when not all users are savvy.
In order to sustain an ecosystem instead of mega-app, that ecosystem needs to be really smoothly integrated, and I know of no good examples of this
This article looks rather rushed -- the description of Zulip is not accurate, and I suspect that folks working on the other products may feel the same way about how their projects are described.
I lead the Zulip project, and I'd like to clarify that Zulip's free community pricing does not have user limits, either in Cloud or self-hosting. The 10 user limit for free mobile notifications only applies to workplace/business use. Larger communities are encouraged to submit a simple form to get approved for notifications beyond 10 users.
And this complaint seems quite strange:
> Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management.
How would a paid subscription work without an account for managing it?
This is an important and timely topic, but I wish a more deeply researched article was the one being widely circulated.
This a good point that I hadn't considered. At least in my experience, DMs are a useful but secondary feature that mostly are useful because it's not uncommon to make connections with people from interacting in the servers themselves. I had been mentally modeling Discord as a chat app, but in a lot of ways it feels more accurate to think of it almost like Facebook with just groups and DMs, only the groups are realtime chat. Over that years I've heard various people talk about using only groups and maybe events as the last things they still used Facebook for, and I deactivated my account years ago but still use Messenger because of the years of contacts I had already built up on it (and the fact that it still is possible to use with a deactivated Facebook account), which provides at least some anecdotal evidence that Discord is basically providing the stickiest features of Facebook.
Stoat isn't working well for me. It's taken over 24 hours to try to register a new account. First I couldn't register after doing several captchas. Then I had to wait for a verification email which took over 12 hours. I signed in to one client, but attempting to reset a password results in the same waiting game and error when selecting a new password.
I wish for the best, but they're probably putting out fires from the increased load
The closest realistic option is probably XMPP and Mumble. I just think both need a modern UI that supports everything that Discord offers OOTB. I am working on a client for XMPP on the side, nothing special yet, but I can login and chat with myself on a prosody instance, so there is that. Would love to work on open source full time, but it never seems to pay the bills. I do intend on eventually open sourcing my client.
All the people I know who joined big servers, have nitro and do it for their emotes. My impression of really big servers is that they also skew really, really young.
That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.
being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Personally I would never want to join that noise. If an IRC channel has more than 50 people I tend to avoid it unless it is a technical channel that may have some knowledgeable people. If I want to reach millions of people I will find a way to join the conversation of an influencer on their podcast but hopefully such a need never comes to pass for me.
IMO most Discord channels I have to use could be better replaced by a traditional web forum. Then at least could you find the knowledge in there using a web search.
Nothing open source and self hostable will be a "platform" then. Being dependent on a central platform/identity server is the way they control you and increase the friction of leaving.
I think the client side could still be a "platform" like pidgin, allowing login and simultaneous participatiin in multiple servers, without needing to be fully centralized.
What disappoints me about this list is the lack of consideration for video calls and screenshare.
This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based distro).
It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.
I really dislike that Linux proper doesn't by default have x.xx-server, x.xx-workstation, x.xx-laptop and x.xx-desktop kernel variants. Or just doesn't have defaults, requiring distros to think about what to set during compilation.
A lot of the current defaults stem from the 90s, and often were eyeballed by the creator of said code. They're not good defaults for modern servers nor workstations nor laptops nor desktops. And all of those devices work best with different defaults.
It doesn't seem (yes, appearances can be deceiving) to be that much work, because no extra code needs to be written. For each variant, just set different default parameter values for stuff like swappiness, lazy RCUs and what not. Make it a thing to revisit the defaults every 10 years.
CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.
> CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.
Based on what I saw 1-2 years ago last time I looked at it, most distributions to customize and don't use the defaults straight up. From memory, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:
- RHEL/SLES - Lots of patches to kernels
- Arch - Closer to just using defaults, some config choices and downstream adjustments (so the opposite of CachyOS almost, which is why we have CachyOS in the first place)
- Ubuntu - Probably the most patched distribution compared to upstream components, also includes a lot of Canonical-specific stuff on top of that.
- Fedora - Has some bleeding edge bits and bobs
- Debian - Bit more conservative than Ubuntu, but still has patches for stability, security and backports.
In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
> In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
Which makes each and every one of those totally different operating systems that can run similar code to each other. We need to stop thinking of these as Linux "distros" and start thinking of these as totally separate and distinct operating systems that are based around the Linux kernel. Sort of like a business cooperative model.
I agree, doubly so when you consider different packaging formats and package managers also, along with different release models.
I've been preaching for a long time that "distro" is the wrong term. Each "distro" is absolutely it's own, standalone operating system. There is no universal "Linux OS" outside of the kernel. Even userland can be swapped out.
I love the separation of concerns. It provides an amazing terminal-first kernel and everything graphical is maintained by various different organizations, and you can choose between many different options.
Maintaining a large distro is extremely difficult and every decision has several trade-offs.
Why would you want different kernels for different device types?
Genuine question! I maintain my own Linux distro (upstream Linux + portage) for all my devices and haven’t found much reason to go beyond kernel per arch. I’m curious if there’s something I could be missing.
vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.
Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop because you only lose about 10% performance and only with specific workloads, but your idle and light load energy consumption improves. Most laptops spend like 95%+ in light or idle load scenarios. Conversely, on a desktop you don't care (much) about idle and light load energy consumption, you only care about keeping max load consumption low enough so that your fans stay quiet. And on a workstation you don't care about a system being whisper quiet so you can go nuts with the energy consumption.
> vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.
You don't need to compile a specific kernel for that, this is setup via sysctl.
Do you mean RCU_LAZY? Most distros will already enable that: it doesn't do anything without rcu_nocbs, so there's no negative impact on server workloads.
[calvin@debian-trixie ~] grep RCU_LAZY /boot/config-6.12.57+deb13-amd64
CONFIG_RCU_LAZY=y
# CONFIG_RCU_LAZY_DEFAULT_OFF is not set
[calvin@debian-trixie ~] grep RCU_NOCB_CPU /boot/config-6.12.57+deb13-amd64
CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU=y
# CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU_DEFAULT_ALL is not set
Swappiness and many others can be changed by some sort of system preset rather built that way. I know not ALL options can be done that way, but I'd want to see changes start there where feasible.
I totally missed that part of your comment, my bad. Thanks for elaborating on those, I feel inspired to experiment!
So far my kernel journey has been about making my hardware work + enabling features, and that’s mostly how I’ve been discovering config options. Do you have any suggestions on where one aught to read further on this sort of kernel tuning?
EDIT: doing some further research, couldn’t you just set those options via sysctl w/o needing to build a separate kernel?
Yes you can adjust them via sysctl or directly as kernel parameter arguments. That isn't my point. My point is that Linux has some horrible defaults :+)
I generally have three types of Linux devices I typically use. My desktop, servers locally/remotely, and "mobile" devices (more like tablets I guess).
For the first, I want the lowest latency for everything I do, together with the highest burstable speed whenever possible, for pretty much all the components.
For the servers, I basically have two types, one which does storage, they just need large disks that can be slow, and one which users actually connect to, that one needs focus on throughput, latency and performance isn't as important as "can serve all requests in a reasonable timeframe, even under load".
Finally, many of the portable devices run on batteries, so on those the focus is power-saving, even if it compromises on performance.
I'm sure others out there have more device types, like ultraweight watches, security devices, monitors, radios and much more. Each one of these have different tradeoffs, and tuning the kernel and OS for each use case makes it a lot better usually. Personally I use NixOS for everything except my desktop (CachyOS right now!), and it makes it really trivial to create profiles based on the same configuration, deployed to all devices, and today they're are tuned for exactly their purpose, as Linus intended :)
I had not heard of labwc before, super cool that it's compatible with openbox themes! Openbox was one of the first "cool wm" I think I used back in the day, probably like 15 years ago now when it supplanted Fluxbox as the dominant *box.
Is there an option to stay permanently in floating mode, and allow manual placement? I'm stuck on AwesomeWM using just floating windows with easy keybindings for moving them around/resizing, etc. and am looking to jump from X11 to Wayland
I prefer it still because it makes sense for every window to be maximized at startup. Also one layout that still makes sense is 1 window taking up 100% of the horizontal space and 95% of the vertical save for a small strip for a terminal.
I have
- Meta + Z: Activate/iterate through terminal windows
- Meta + W: Activate/iterate through browser windows
And when on a laptop I maybe do a split view 2-3 times a day for a short term. 95% of the time it's full sized windows which I switch between using keyboard shortcuts.
Why does this feel like an ad? I've seen pangram mentioned a few times now, always with that tagline. It feels like a marketing department skulking around comments.
The other pangram mention elsewhere in this comment section is also me -- I'm totally unaffiliated with them, just a fan of their tool
I specify the accuracy and false positive rate because otherwise skeptics in comment sections might otherwise think it's one of the plethora of other AI detection tools that don't really work
FWIW I work on AI and I also trust Pangram quite a lot (though exclusively on long-form text spanning at least 4 or more paragraphs). I'm pretty sure the book is heavily AI written.
Absolutely. I was just reminiscing about a '97 game called "Claw". The studio that made it shut down earlier this year and I wish I could make a sort-of remake of it, but you legally can't. It's not even clear who owns the rights to it anymore.
I mean it's 2D platformer, you should be able to reverse engineer the engine and reuse the assets. I mean the have bit perfect decompiles of N64 games to C now. It's doable.
