Wayland and audio is fixed, but only on the canary branch for the moment, this isnt lazy either, they changed the whole screenshare flow to suit linux's permission prompts
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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I was almost convinced they were keeping this broken on purpose, it's been broken so long. Like, years long.
It was broken so long I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken. With steam working so well on Linux now, broken discord streaming without actual working audio share was one of the last things that posed a hurdle for gamers ditching Windows.
(In the meantime, thank you Vesktop for your service <3)
I like how Vesktop updates in the background. Discord proper has to close, download the .deb, install, and relaunch.
I saw something from a discord dev (can't find it, so grain of salt) about how there was interest recently to do it, but they'd have to work on other stuff that affected everyone first, and they'd probably get it done by q4 2024, guess they were right.
I think before then the whole linux graphics and audio space hadn't really stabilized enough for them to be interested.
Tech companies are fully capable of being lazy for free. Fixing this takes dev time from other work that brings Discord money so doing this costs them, especially considering that Linux userbase must be rather tiny. 99% of software companies don't give a shit about making quality product and will always try their hardest to do as little work as possible while making as much money as possible. If fixing a bug will cost them more than potential profits from making it work then they won't fix it.
You're right of course, it's definitely down to simple lack of incentive, rather than some kind of conspiracy. But the conspiracy was a fun shower thought! :)
Heh. There's a ticket with Splunk. It's a simple request: do the 30 sec of work to let us install your software rpm from a proper yum repo.
They can't figure out how.
They won't ask.
It's 12 years old now.
The ticket for them to do a trivial exercise with tools twice as old, is now a tween. It can ride the bus on its own. I think it can get a Facebook account. Maybe.
We should get one for it.
It was the same with Zoom but AFAIK they're finally working on it now.
The Zoom flatpak works fine. Haven't tried native.
I had weird issues with the Flatpak (can't remember what they were) but the native RPM worked fine. Previously you had to download and install/update the RPM manually but I've heard they're working on proper RPM and deb repos.
That's good! Options don't hurt imo, as long as they're properly maintained.
who in their sane mind uses zoom on their private device. holy molly
I'm using it on my work PC, since it's what we use for meetings.
Is there really? Long time splunk admin, I would love to see this
You give them too much credit. It's just shitty, that's it.
Discord is pretty much broken on all platform. It always was. There's just no real alternative unfortunately.
"Don't attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence"
Lets create an alternative.
If Twitter is any indication, Discord would have to fuck up big, and for a long time for people to switch.
I agree, but working on an alternative an cultivating it could be a good start. Look at mastodon or lemmy.
There is an alternative people have used before discord came, it is called teamspeak. Is still around as well, but works more like a federated system since everyone has to set up and host their own server for people to use.
Teamspeak is no alternative to discord. Sorry. Also its not even open source, is it?
Discord isnt open source either tho so how does that matter for the comparison?
And while yes it is a little outdated, I do recall the time before discord when people would have their own teamspeak server instead, which worked very similar to the fediverse.
You had the client and could connect to any server you had the credentials to, which each were owned and hosted by various people or groups each with their own rules and code of conduct.
Mumble is open source.
I'm all for it tho I have no idea how to grab the folk's attention
We would have to sit down and actually think what an opensource solution can achieve and how it gets traction. Also from the get go it should be clear that there will be no feature parity between it and discord. If it was me, I would cut out the whole chatroom functionality, leave private messaging in, use threaded conversations as a standard and but a decent videocall system on top. But this would be my version of it, other people have other needs.
For the video call system you would not have to reinvent the wheel, use something existing like Jitsi (?) or alternatives. Then you would
Maybe the best bet is to look at matrix and wrench out the chatroom focus and replace it with threads?
best alternative would be a forum + voice calls + dms IMO
why cut chatroom functionality? Servers are the main reason people use discord?
Not in my bubble, chats create insurmountable loads of noise. By focusing on threads you get the discussion much more focused and streamlined. Example: Most of my discords are ttrpg related, where with the usage of bots games are scheduled. Or where discussion are happening around certain ttrpg systems.
I agree that a lot of discord servers focus on chat rooms. But you could retain that by simply having 1-2 chatrooms per server and structure/direct conversations to dedicated threads/voice chats instead.
Again this is just MY view. I am totally aware that other people, use it differently.
that's a totally fair view, and the people at matrix seem to agree because it has threading, seems to be the kind you like, too
No, matrix is still very focused on chat room sadly and for the video conferencing you need to use jitsi as far as I am aware, at least thats how we've set it up at work. The thread function in discord is much better actually.
oh, also matrix just added proper e2ee video conferencing that doesnt use jitsi, its a native feature
huh, ive used both, how is the discord implementation better? They seem the same to me.
I mean I am not sure, but in matrix you can just "reply" to a comment in a chat room and therefore create a thread? In discord you can have whole "chatrooms" be transfered to discussion only with threads. I am not sure about the terminology but it looks very different to me. Basically, you can set Discord up like a community board etc.
ooh, you're talking about that, i see. Yeah matrix doesnt have that
It was 100% because the existing Electron version they were using was ancient, a giant pain in the ass to update, and represents exactly zero revenue for them so they hadn't bothered putting anyone on fixing it. Every tech company has the ticking time bomb in the corner like that.
Screen sharing infrastructure (for Wayland) in Linux was still in development recently. Maybe they just wanted to be able to use newer APIs?
The screen casting portal is 6 years old. 6 years is not recent...
Just being supported as a protocol doesn't mean everything is done. Chromium probably didn't have it until years after that, and operating systems may not have implemented it umtil more recently.
Chromium had it for qhite a while, but it isn't really relevant... Discord's implementation of screen sharing was custom on X11, if they had used the one that comes with Electron, this would've worked far earlier.
DEs that had a Wayland session (aka Gnome and Plasma) supported it very soon after the portal was made.
The real reason won't be anything external, but something in the company. Usually it's just that Linux isn't a priority for a given company, so even if there's a motivated engineer that wants to take care of it, it's hard justifying to their managers why they need to spend a lot of time on it.
This isn't exclusive to Discord, to use a very similar example, Zoom is kinda worse. In the past, Zoom misused a Gnome screenshot API to do screen casting very badly, and recently they ported to the desktop portal - not because they had a choice, but because Gnome locked down the API they were using. Screen casting still only works on Gnome though, because they still check for the desktop name. If you set it to Gnome, it works perfectly fine everywhere else too!
All it would take to fix that problem is removing an if statement, yet, despite many complaints, it hasn't happened... because no big customer has complained, so it's just one of the unimportant Linux bugs.
Thanks for the additional info.