For Amarok, have you tried Strawberry? It’s based on Amarok and looks pretty similar but it’s actually maintained.

The shell script available for download in the Code section is just pure evil!

I like how this requires creating so many nested directories that the total file path length exceeds 1 GB. That’s nuts!

I suspect SteamOS is more like, “I run what now?” for most people. :)

Interesting. At first glance, it looks very similar to RedNotebook but based on Qt instead.

I use RedNotebook every day. How does this compare? Assuming you know about that one of course!

For family, the only issue was confusion in Element for the Sign In vs Sign Up button. I had given them credentials myself to make it easier, but one of them tried using “Sign Up” with those credentials, which of course led to “username is taken” so they signed up with a different username.

I had started 1-on-1 conversations with all of the other family members, but since this one created a new account, they started a group conversation with me. So, they are listed under group conversations for me now, but meh, that works too.

I have a 1 GB node on Linode which is just a bit too little it seems, especially when joining the larger rooms on federated servers. However, I managed to make synapse work with systemd so now it just autorestarts if it ever crashes. I don’t even notice anything anymore. Getting synapse to play nice with SELinux and systemd was by far the biggest challenge, but that’s unrelated to federating.

Currently synapse is idling at 20% mem usage and barely any CPU usage.

Another non-federation-related issue is that I also had a minor issue where Nginx limited uploads to 10 MB which is a bit harsh for uploading videos. Took me a bit to figure that one out, but in the end it was just adding one line to /etc/nginx/conf.d/matrix.conf in the server sections, i.e.:

client_max_body_size 250M;

Setting up the rest was pretty straightforward. I even got a TURN server running as well even though I don’t really use the video calling part yet.

Hopefully! I’m not sure it will happen though. Once a university is on Office 365, they get Teams for “free”, whereas with Matrix you need to set up and admin your own servers. North American universities seem to be either Microsoft or Google and nothing else.

Also, I’m really surprised MS Teams still ranked so highly in Zufriedenheit. The university I work for is an all-Microsoft shop and we have to use it daily. Every once in a while, I see people using Teams unable to use the rest of their computer since Teams sucks up all the CPU during video calls. Some researchers simply refuse to use it (and pick Zoom instead).

Nice! I’ve been only running an instance for about a year now on a Linode instance. I did set it up to be federated since I use it for various Matrix channels I am interested in. Also some IRC channels thanks to the bridging functionality on Freenode (and now Libera.chat of course). I’d say there was a bit of a learning curve, but it’s been rock solid.

Fairly recently, I got my family on Matrix as well. They’ve been trying to get me on Whatsapp for a while but that does not exactly excite me. I don’t have smartphones running Android or iOS anyway. I did manage to set up a Whatsapp bridge and an Android VM with a throwaway VOIP number. However, that lasted about a week until I was banned by Facebook. Great! I used that to convince my family to just install Element on their phone and connect to my server.

That’s been working really well ever since! They can send pictures, videos and chat messages really easily now.