I would say the same & I don’t even use it—but I would trust it being around the longest & is better than GNOME IMO.

I use aerc thru home-manager accounts on NixOS

A lot of the world can’t just drink tap water with a basic filter

& abduco can work if you only need attach/detach

K. Have fun doing nothing & sticking to your shitty networks that give you no control or freedom—as opposed to trying literally anything to change the situation.

So you are saying we should all use Reddit, Discord, Meta WhatsApp, & Microsoft GitHub since more folks are there? The only way to buck those trends is to be the change you want to see & slowly move what groups you can away. You don’t have to get everything to buy in at once & there are mirrors / gateways that you can use as a transition. Make a clan homepage & say the VoIP is here & the chat is there… now you aren’t beholden to one specific tool going to shit or waiting 10 years for something to have literally every feature you want. If 2 applications is a barrier, maybe that someone isn’t the right fit for your group anyhow.

For the chat part: IRCv3, XMPP, Jami, maybe SimpleX.

As it stands for VoIP: Mumble, Jitsi (XMPP), Jami, maybe Movim (XMPP) in the near-ish future.

IRC & Mumble is centralized but super lightweight so you can spin up a server on any old hardware & can be fine for ‘clans’. Clients are efficient too. They aren’t encrypted other than TLS but are good enough for its largely-room-based goals.

XMPP is a generalized, decentralized protocol for presence & messaging. It has multiple FOSS servers that require a potato for hardware that you can spin up in a bedroom to join other bedroom servers where you can control your own data (same as Matrix, but a lot less resources & more mature). Chat can be encrypted (most clients support PGP & OMEMO). Some clients can do voice/video calls, many are working on multi-user call at present. It is the protocol behind WhatsApps, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, & more.

Jami is P2P IIRC, but I haven’t used it—so I won’t comment.

But you can use a chat service for chat & a VoIP service for VoIP & that can be fine. A kitchen sink isn’t always the best approach.

But if you are looking to keep tabs on something, Movim is very much focused on multi-user jingle & is something you could deploy & have decentralized users join from their own servers.

Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.

Doesn’t have a cup holder either! Why does ever alternative need to have every feature or it can’t be called an alternative? Does your VoIP app need the ability to send videos? Can you not use something else in tandem to do the more social side? Sometimes it’s better to focus on one thing & do it well—especially under-resourced like free software often is. You could argue just as easily these other features as bloat if you don’t want or use them.

AUR has a lot of packages but still nowhere near as much as Nixpkgs

So? Not everything is packaged on all distros & you can benefit from sharing & reusing declarative configuration even if for specific scopes (meaning not just NixOS).

Just use Nix. It can run all the packages on whatever platform. It has the largest repository of software & are some of the most up-to-date.

I don’t think so, but of any project they are in a position to actually propose it, implement it, & have folks actually use it & provide feedback

It is a fool’s errand to try to chase Microsoft like this—folks will demand compatibility with all their new Copilot-enhanced CI. Present something better please—this would entice users to leave.

Truly free… yet in its fork of Gitea it is copying more Microsoft GitHub features like Action YAML spaghetti instead of offering an improvement. Instead of being a better offering than Microsoft, they are cloning even more features where it is even more of a hard sell IMO by not offering anything new in the experience.

Note that Git also isn’t the only distributed version control system (DVCS); there maybe be other alternatives out there for you not just in code forge but the system underneath it too.

GitLab is open core, not open source. It is also a publicly-traded company in the US that does have shareholder obligations—which should cause some sort of long-term hesitation. It does have a better CI/CD system than the Microsoft product & the community edition can be self-hosted.

Tried it for a month, but key combos conflict far too often & I do not perceive it as fast as tmux.

This is sometimes true, but I would rather have a slightly worse UI and/or have to use 2 applications for more specific tasks than trading off data just to have everything under one bloated umbrella.