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Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite... how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can't easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine
Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward...
Not to mention how crappy the linux client is for linux users (I use one of those "thirdparty" clients myself, since the linux client is unbearable)
It's also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they're mostly preserved for eternity.
trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it's a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.
@Skooshjones @privsecfoss @foss Also, another reason why big tech catches on, every time, is not so much that the UX is glossy but that Zoom, Apple, etc, all know that #Accessibility is needed to, 1, be dominant. As people look for stuff and tools that are accessible to Disabled users, Apple and Zoom come up a lot because they knew that capturing accessible design was a great way to capture a huge portion of users and otherwise. 2. Accessible design works for everybody. Seriously, having a far cleaner UI is better for everybody, including developers when they need to change code later.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn't get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren't installing their OS' in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it's pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it's one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn't have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can't be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren't "nice" features for people in the Apple ecosystem, they're baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don't just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn't enough. And I'm not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
UI/UX has always been a massive problem in F/OSS. The biggest issue is that you need one person, or a team, with a coherent design vision, actual UI/UX understanding, and who will make sure that not every random pull request related to UX is accepted and ensure those contributions align with the design vision.
That rarely happens
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS' map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.
I think this is more of a problem of knowing when a specific tool should be used. Probably most people familiar with hadoop are aware of all the overhead it creates. At the same time you hit a point in dataset sizes (I guess even more with "real time" data processing) where it's not even feasible with a single machine. (at the same time I'm not too knowledgeable about hadoop and bigdata, so anyone else feel free to chime in)
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn't serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays ~~people~~ communities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.
Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don't understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can't search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a "chat" search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
i3wm
It's now more than a decade old and considered feature-complete 2 years back. But the basic usage is still the same since its initial launch. No matter how many versions of Windows or Gnome or KDE come and go, I use i3 in the same as I did when it launched. I don't need "new" features because the existing features are more than enough.
I fell completely in love by the look and practicality of what i see and listen about i3wm. It all started when exploring unixporn on reddit.
It's one of the things that make me sad for not being linux-savvy and even if I was I couldn't use it for my daily driver because my company/team work is based on the whole Microsoft Office ecossystem.
So I just contemplate the minimalist beauty of it.
sway is the wayland based modern alternative that I use (and prefer). It does not do anything flashy and most i3 config options work just the same.
This. After the initial learning for i3wm I never looked back.
And I dread the times where I have to use something else (work environment...)
Not much. That's the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.
Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Part of my rexxit so far has included me dusting off newsreaders and rss feeds again.
Im trying to find a good set up. Newsblur seems to be a front runner. I have nextcloud selfhosted, so I could use that with the $2.99 android app or I could pay for newsblur or feedly a few bucks each month.
Either way, having a self-curated feed of news these last few days has been pretty amazing. There is no algorithm tuned for engagement pumping news in my face. It's just stories, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts that I want to see (on my terms).
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I've ever seen.
Agree on RSS.
Don't have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it's what old school forums lacked.
Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.
IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.