I also run a lot of proprietary stuff like Discord or Instagram due to peer pressure but I let it slide and put my hopes on Android sandboxing the apps and GrapheneOS tweaks. In my opinion, making sure that proprietary app can’t reliably access your data and never giving it anything sensitive yourself is a decent risk model.

The only proprietary software I use and somewhat trust is Obdisian. Honestly, it’s just excellent and I can’t see myself moving away from it anytime soon.

Yep, that’s exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that’s what it does best

Can’t you do everything you’ve listed on github though? Report bugs on issues tab, ask questions on discussions tab, following up is easy. Everything is also indexed by search engines and can be looked up later on.

While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don’t know an alternative that is better at everything.

Discord’s main problems:

• Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
• Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support

However alternatives we have are not ideal either:

1. Old-school web forums
   • Great for info archival / organized tech support
   • Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what’s new
   • Due to slower pace of communication, it’s harder to just log in and “hang out” with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.

2. FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that’s what most use)
   • Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
   • Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it’s a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There’s often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
   • it’s FOSS and Private, though

Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive

Not a hot take, I keep saying the same thing in different threads. I was not able to switch to Linux for years before I understood that I have problems with Gnome not with Linux itself, tried KDE and given I was migrating from Windows it clicked immediately.

After you gain some experience, DE becomes mostly irrelevant, but it is crucial for starting off in an unfamiliar environment.

I think Matrix suffers from some issues with large communities, for instance Graphene OS has already had to abandon 2-3 of their main group chats due to same bug and last time I checked (2-3 months ago) there has even been talks of switching to Discord. That is, just in case, a community of some of the most diehard privacy nerds btw

I’ve already given a similar answer somewhere in this thread, but my point is, yes, it works well for advanced users (stack overflow enjoyers) and total beginners (Where do I click to get to Facebook?), while average users are in the middle, and are simultaneously require more features than beginners, but do not have the means to solve them.

Yeah, that’s the thing. Two categories of users can properly enjoy Linux (in my opinion):

• Technically advanced users who can figure out a lot on their own
• Technically illiterate users (“Show me where to click to get to Facebook”)

While average users are the ones to suffer. They are technically picky enough to require more advanced features than “click to open Google”, but not nerdy enough to spend hours reading stack overflow to make something they need work.

Most average users will be actively displeased that their settings menu is now different and confusing, office tools have slightly different UI, and some specialized software is missing.

Average user does not spend hours learning GIMP, they blame Linux for not having Photoshop and quit. Sad but true

For me, logout+login fixed all the issues. I thought it was broken too until I tried last night

Am I the only one who never promotes Linux?

I’m currently holding an opinion that everyone who can enjoy Linux will eventually try it on their own.

I think, despite what many people say, an average user still has a very rough time using it, and in my opinion you need some level of nerdiness in order to overcome adaptation pains, and such people already use internet in a nerdy way and will try out Linux on their own eventually.

My copied answer to other user in this thread:

I’m in US. My ISP Xfinity provides their own router and has decided their users are too stupid to use router settings so they purged port forwarding settings from the router firmware altogether. Now you have to use their mobile application which doesn’t allow you to make port forwarding rules for a specific IP (because again, they think their user is an idiot that can’t figure out IP numbers), instead it just gives you a list of devices and you have to select one to create a port forwarding rule. Wired devices are not on that list.

I’m in US. My ISP Xfinity decided their users are too stupid to use router settings so they purged port forwarding settings from the router panel altogether. Now you have to use their mobile application which doesn’t allow you to make port forwarding rules for a specific IP (because again, they think their user is an idiot that can’t figure out IP numbers), instead it just gives you a list of devices and you have to select one to create a port forwarding rule. Wired devices are not on that list.