About Matrix Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.
Matrix Manifesto We believe:
People should have full control over their own communication. People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach. The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right. Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.
I like Matrix but it’s far from Discord right now
That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.
If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.
I don’t think Matrix feels slow because the app is slow. In my experience, I have tried 3 homeservers (community.rs, matrix.im, and mozilla.org (hosted by modular), and there was a really really big performance gap. I’m not gonna say which one is which, but sending message on one (the time between you hit send and the circled checkmark appears) usually takes less than 1 seconds, another averages at maybe 1.5 seconds, the other often takes more than 5 seconds. Choosing a performant homeserver could really impact your experience with Matrix, and it’s sad that people can’t really know how performant a server is unless they create an account on it and try it out themselves.
I loved Discord back in 2015/2016. I hate it now.
Me and my boys have been using discord for years now to chat while we game and maybe stream what we’re doing just to each other.
Discord has added features and shit I suppose but I haven’t changed how I use it at all since I first started.
Part of the reason I hate it now is they refuse to support Linux. In fact their support in general is pretty crappy.
I mean I am not a fan of discord, but it’s just an Electron app, like Spotify, isn’t it? meaning you can just open it in a browser you probably have running anyways
I got Discord installed on Ubuntu just fine, what doesn’t work about it?
On top of what the other guy said, it just doesn’t behave like a Linux app. It doesn’t respect the package manager, if there’s a new version but the package hasn’t been updated yet, the app just refuses to launch. Like the developers literally won’t even let you use the app if it’s not the current version.
It’s also a electron app, so it doesn’t respect the window manager either. It has to have it’s own special window decorations that don’t match, and when I used i3 (tiling window manager) it was very difficult to get it to work normally in my setup like every other app did with no effort.
Finally, it asks for super user access! Why in the name of unholy fuck is a userland app demanding administrative powers on my computer?
Funny you say that, I actually just noticed that today. I tried launching it and it refused to let me use it until I updated. It was super annoying.
It works but they won’t provide support if it breaks. There was a bug with screen sharing sound on Linux (and maybe macOS as well?) for a LONG time, like years, before it was eventually fixed.
On macOS they also took their sweet ass time with the Apple Silicon version, when the regular version was broken as hell on the shiny new M1 Macs.
They only really care about « gAmERs » which to then means Windows.
Wait, this was fixed? I haven’t been bothering with screen sharing because I thought this was still an issue.
Last time I checked it was. I don’t know if a new bug was introduced since however.