Convos - self hosted web based client written in Perl of all things, because it’s small, simple, does exactly what I want and no more, and avoids my having to faff with client + bouncer which was getting old 10 years ago and feels positively withering now.

https://convos.chat/

Yes TheLounge is fantastic but I switched to Convos these days because it’s lighter weight and I somehow manage to overrun my disk much less often :)

Nice to see that KDE is so well supported! I’d been running Manjaro KDE the last time I had Linux installed on my desktop but I may give Debian a try this time around.

I’ll take “Product Categories That SHOULD NEVER EXIST” for $1000 Alex!

I’m not gonna speak for Canonical but snaps enable commercial vendors to more readily ship their apps on the Ubuntu platform.

Humans are inherently evil. There is but a thin veneer we call “civilization” that stops of from beating each other to death with whatever object can be brought to hand.

And what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China? :)

I get it.

I don’t love Snaps either.

However, a thing I try to remember and wish others would as well is simply this: Canonical is a company. Their goal is to make money. They are not out to create the ultimate free as in freedom Linux distribution.

This does (to my mind) not make them evil, and ESPECIALLY doesn’t make the folks who work there evil. It makes them participants in the great horrible game that is Capitalism, and expecting anything else from them is going to lead to heartache, as you’ve seen.

If you want a Linux distro that shares your preferences and won’t try to jam snaps down your throat, you might consider giving Debian a whirl as many others have.

Continuing to ride the Ubuntu train and raging against the dying of the light when it continues chugging in the direction it’s been headed for YEARS seems … futile :)

Is that contract copyrighted?

I think by far the biggest problem with open source is that the user community fundamentally mis-understands the nature of the transaction involving them and the developer(s) of the software they’re using.

I think if we could make everyone sit down, take 10 minutes and just read The Social Contract Of Open Source a lot of people would keep developing OSS software.

Brass tacks: You are being given a gift. The person who gave you that gift owes you NOTHING because… They gave you a gift and by using their software you chose to accept it.

I see it all the time in the open source project I co-maintain, and I have it SUPER easy beacause ours is really just a bundle of configuration files for Neovim.