• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Here’s a different take, as a game dev:

    Epic actual employs quite a few people who work with Linux. The Unreal engine (and even, to a certain degree, editor) has native support for Linux.

    The reasons they’re not including Linux support in their store front are two fold:

    1. There aren’t enough pure Linux users to matter - 0.1% of an already small user base is negligible.

    2. The only serious Linux user base in gaming relates to the Steam Deck, a product that pushes a rival (and the dominant) store front.

    While Valve’s move to push Linux gaming is brilliant for us gamers, it also kind of cements us in their camp.

    There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway, and it absolutely supports their bottom line to attack it.

    And, no, it isn’t because of any David v. Goliath tale of a little guy standing up to a brute: it’s because a fellow giant has decided to ally itself with Linux, and all of us have - invariably - been shuffled into their camp.

    I think the Epic Games Store has a place in this world as a niche storefront with limited visibility but higher access to sales profits as a result of that.

    They’ll never grow to the size of Steam, and that’s okay. The largest storefront in the world supports Linux not just on its platform, but by developing tools for everyone that makes Linux gaming viable. That is enough, IMO.


  • I’m very much with you.

    Never understood why Plex, a once open source fork of XBMC, was seen as a positive thing when they switched to the closed source, SaaS model.

    I also don’t understand the love for Tailscale when Wireguard exists.

    But, anyway, the same people who are reacting shocked to Plex can be shocked when Tailscale does the same.

    They’ll probably hop on Discord to vent their frustrations before there, too, they find themselves spurred by a company with no clear plan on monetization finding out that offering hosted services at a yearly loss can only exist for so long.

    Open source isn’t just about idealogy, it’s about longevity for software that can’t be clearly monetized - harken back to “amazing” services like Keybase that worked great for a few years until their VCs started asking for return of investment.

    Use the shit that was made for you, not to exploit you. And if that shit isn’t up to your standard, learn to contribute, or just enjoy the corporate graveyard in which you choose to live.

    (so sorry for the pseudo-unhinged rant, but between the recent Win11, Discord controversies - and now, this - I’m just fed up with all the shocked_pikachu.jpg posts I’m seeing on Lemmy)


  • But as far as I can remember, you can’t administer the rooms in a space as one. Like you need to be invited into each separate room.

    Nope, again - I don’t understand who told you this. When you’re creating a room in Matrix you can make it either public, invite only, or only joinable via membership in a specific space.

    Here’s a screenshot of the room security interface:

    Not saying that you couldn’t add that, I’m saying they don’t seem to want to “do what discord did”. Which is a bummer since the success of discord clearly shows what would be needed.

    You are correct in that they “don’t want to do what discord this”: recently (and you can see this in their apps like EleX) they’ve transitioned to looking and acting more like modern mobile chat apps like Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram - a decision I’m assuming they’ve made as most of their funding comes from people who want a replacement for those apps and not Discord.

    Regardless, just using a Discord-like client (e.g. Commet) is enough to get the experience you want.


  • There’s only one standard, it has no forks. The discussion is about a filtering feature.

    A lot of people don’t seem to respect spaces and communities - from my perspective it looks like the devs are currently pivoting to make the official client look and act more like Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp than Discord/IRC.

    Your issue is that the dev team of EleX not prioritizing a feature you want.

    If anything, this is a strength of an open source ecosystem: someone who agrees with you was able to, months ago, setup a fork that appeals to your work flow.

    Try that with Discord, next time!








  • Matrix does have all of that, though? Except for voice.

    I use matrix/element for socializing and Mumble for voice chat while gaming.

    To respond to each comment:

    • Element is a unified UI, available on PC/Web/Mobile.
    • Starting and managing a community involves hitting the + button, creating a community, creating rooms in that community, then setting permissions and ACLs - pretty similar to discord, though with more control as you own the server.
    • Embedded content is possible through the embed button.
    • Video and voice work, but aren’t great for gaming (see below).

    Element Call (aka the new MatrixRTC spec) is great for video calls, but leaves a lot to be desired for chatting while gaming.


  • From a chat standpoint, the two are near identical - yes - but Matrix lacks the “voice/video calls as persistent rooms” feature that Discord has. This was planned a while back, but has recently been pushed on the backburner[1] as they work on Element Call.

    Early on Matrix was sort of being built up as an IRC/Discord alternative, but recently they’ve pivoted more towards a WA/Telegram/Slack alternative as most of their financial support comes from European governments and companies looking for strong and secure internal communication solutions they can manage themselves.

    So, TL;DR you probably won’t see the exact Discord like features you want land in the spec any time soon as they’re not being funded.

    So that means, right now:

    • No persistent voice/video rooms (but they are on the roadmap!)
    • No push-to-talk or “game friendly” settings like voice auto-detection (also not really on the roadmap)

    Having said all that, Matrix is brilliant and I highly encourage people to check it out. I use a Matrix <-> Signal bridge for most of my comms with my friends, and we voice chat on Mumble. Not ideal, but you get to avoid Discord and you get a very similar experience! Bonus points for Mumble as it’s super lightweight.

    ~[1] It’s not really on the backburner so much as it’s something that will have to be worked on after the new VOIP stack - Element Call - is integrated in the wider Matrix ecosystem. There is an experimental “video rooms” feature, but that really isn’t the same as a native, persistent voice-only room.~





  • Been a Linux user for ages, I do have Windows 11 installed on another partition but I rarely - if ever - boot into it.

    I mention the above spiel because I don’t understand what additional points people have against windows 11? It seems very similar to windows 10 for me - what’re the reasons for people hating it?

    Genuinely not trying to be obtuse, here - I’m just wondering what the primary pain points are of win 11?

    Is it the requirement for using a Microsoft account to log in vs. a normal local account? Or the one drive stuff? (upon install it did move most of my personal folders into a weird OneDrive directory, and I had to use the registry to wipe out OneDrive and move them back. Very annoying.)





  • As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:

    1. Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
    2. If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.

    For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.

    As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.

    So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.

    Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)

    Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.