Honestly, its gotta be the MS Office suite.
Yes if you’re just writing your own simple documents libreoffice/OpenOffice will work, but if you have to do anything more complex than a single page spreadsheet, text-on-white presentations, or 3 page MLA book reports… or, even worse, have to interact with documents and spreadsheets created by basically any other person on the planet, I’ve just never had a good consistent experience with any of the free options.
Disagree. Libreoffice is pretty capable for most use cases nowadays.
Compatibility is also pretty good with Microsoft formats despite Microsoft‘s best efforts.
OpenOffice is dead.
it’s pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can’t get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.
And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.
unfortunately “pretty good” is not “guaranteed”, which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
I’ll still use the libreoffice options if i’m, say, already logged into my Linux install and don’t want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well… I just use it.
As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.
I’m not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.
Yeah I don’t think that’s an issue anymore.
I hate Office365 with passion. It’s extremely unproductive and alternatives like Quip are much better.
That’s why I don’t use any of the real “365” web apps, only their desktop apps which do keep the bullshit to some minimum.
I’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
Quip is very lightweight. It’s not clogged with 200 features I’m never going to use.
If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
Unfortunately industry and academia does not view it in such a manner… those microsoft contracts are too appealing for them lol
I’ve found OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice) is very compatible with Microsoft’s Office document format. I can open and edit docx files created by other people with no problem.
I don’t need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I’m looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don’t know any good MS Access alternative.
“you’ll get used to the ribbon, it’s just a new UI”
Nope, still fucking hate it
Disagree but collaboration is horrible. Online Office sucks too though, they dont even try. They want people to use Windows.
Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous “collaboration” is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I’ll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
Yeah wow thats not better. Never used that, but finishing off formatting on a complex Paper is not really possible
Eh, beamer is more than enough for most presentations. If your slideshow needs to be that flashy, you probably need more substance.
git puts track changes to shame.
You’re absolutely right about compatibility though.
If you’re using git to track document changes then you’re almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I’ve used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.
Not only mathematics, pretty much everyone in the world of science/academia uses LaTeX. For git, I’ve seen some stuff, but most researchers that program a decent amount are reasonably familiar with git as well.
That’s still a far higher degree of technical competence than is possessed by the target audience for PowerPoint, Google Slides, or LibreOffice present. Also, claiming someone isn’t technical just because they’re not a computer programmer is a little odd. Most programmers I know don’t go anywhere near LaTeX because it’s so confusing and the spec is so complicated. They use powerpoint, Miro, or markdown slides when they want to present something.
This guys reply to me was literally “git isn’t too technical, mathematicians use this extremely complicated program for generating highly technical documents all the time so obviously grandma could too!”
I agree 100% with you, I tried to use LaTeX ONE time in college and nearly chucked my computer out the window, and I’m a software developer. I was using it for a math class and couldn’t get my head around any of it.
It certainly isn’t a good replacement for MSWord or PowerPoint for the VAST majority of people who don’t need to put mathematical notation into their presentations and just need words on a screen
Git diff will look pretty terrible for docx or similar files. The thing with the builtin change tracking is that it’ll actually show you what changed in the document view
The comment you’re replying to was talking about LaTeX, not .docx.
But like, using LaTeX as a replacement for microsoft word is NOT really useful advice for the vast majority of people who use Word. I don’t need ANY of the special things LaTeX does, and I’ve been using Word all my life to do the basic stuff I need it for.
I get where people here are coming from, but the whole point of this thread is talking about proprietary software which is better for the average use case than open source stuff, and I think the point still stands that MSOffice products absolutely fit that bill. Yes, open source or free alternatives exist, but they aren’t nearly as good, feature-full, and easy to learn and use as the open source alternatives.
The fact that we’re here arguing whether LaTeX is a viable alternative to Word and Power Point kinda proves that MSOffice is the best for this IMO, because LaTeX isn’t exactly easy to pick up and use and is really intended for industries that need extremely complex formatting on their presentations and papers.
No one here is talking about using LaTeX instead of Word. They are talking about making presentations, not documents.
And yeah, I can see how making presentations in LaTeX is faster and easier (for some people) because PowerPoint is so incredibly annoying and slow to use. And the ability to use version tracking is very nice.
Ah, I took it so that they mentioned beamer / LaTeX as a separate thing from change tracking, which is usually more of a document editor feature than a presentation editor feature.
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
beamer
I’ve used beamer before but honestly LaTeX is awful to use. It’s the standard tool so I have to use it for my work but I hate every minute of it.
Photoshop is easier to use than gimp. I don’t pay for photoshop, but if I needed something like that I would.
Krita is closer to Photoshop than Gimp, although still not up to it. Just in case you ever need PS, try krita first.
Thanks I’ll remember that just in case!
Photopea is good for most tasks
Krita is excellent for painting, not very good for image editing though.
Hard disagree. I use it all the time for photo editing.
Well, there’s better tools out there
Again, just my opinion, but I prefer Krita to any FLOSS alternative. I’ve been designing professionally for over a decade, using Adobe for most of it; Krita is my preferred FLOSS tool for photo editing, and I’ve tried them all.
I’m surprised, I never managed to use it efficiently for that purpose. Perhaps AffinityPhoto spoiled me a bit. I love Krita for illustration work though, nothing compares… As far as commercial alternatives go, I haven’t tried Clip Paint although everybody praises it- but I don’t really feel the need to. Apparently it’s excellent?
Krita has g’mic and it’s open source. It’s photoshop that is still not up to there
Krita is a drawing program not really a photo editor like PS/Gimp. Paint.net was a pretty good PSlite last time I tried it
I wouldn’t say Photoshop is easy but Gimp is horrendous.
It’s usable with photogimp, but Photoshop still has better tools and filters.
Hard to compare.
The two apps just have a different workflow…
Well yeah I was answering for me though, not the whole internet.
Gimp has a work flow that I can’t get into, photoshop clicks better. For you, it could be the opposite and that’s great.
I’m not selling photoshop, I don’t even use either anymore. It would be stupid not to try to make gimp work for you first.
Depends if you learn gimp or PS first.
Like if you start life with Linux, windows seems weird
Idk, I learned GIMP first for years, and kept being annoying how unintuitive it was.
Then I tried Photoshop on a friend’s computer for a week, and found how much easier it was to use.
I don’t use Photoshop though since I use Linux
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They aim to introduce that in version 3.0, which they say will be a complete overhaul of the app.
Non-destructive editing through live adjustment layers is definitely the single most useful feature any editing software can have.
That alone makes life so much easier.
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I remember people saying “3.0 is right around the corner” several years ago.
I categorize GIMP 3.0 the same as ASOIAF, Star Citizen, and the Google Drive client for Linux. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I see it, but I ain’t holding my breath.
I imagine by the time it releases I’ll have bought Affinity v3 already
Well yeah, that’s the whole point. It’s harder to learn another workflow when you’re already in the mindset of the other.
If you’re talking about general ergonomy (as opposed to functionality), you may find Affinity Photo to be a breath of fresh air. It’s close to Ps (on purpose) but it is so much better thought out, the way you interact with your documents. Really worth trying
Same with Inkscape vs Affinity Designer.
I really wanted Inkscape to work for me, though I was constantly fighting the UI and some weird artifacting Inkscape produced exporting SVG files.
Affinity Designer was, and still is, especially since their licenses are perpetual/non-subscription, well worth the price and is a dream to use.
Same with Lightroom vs Darktable.
Darktable is pretty much a Lightroom replica in terms of the workflow. Its main issue is that Darktable reacts to slider changes in an unpredictable way. Small value differences lead to overblown changes to the image. Fine tuning the result is near impossible.
Does it have a good panorama sticker or HDR merger? Those are the tools I absolutely need from Lightroom
Not sure, never used these features.
Ah, might be! It’s been 10+ years since I tried it. Back then I found it very hard to navigate
How does Rawtherapee compare to that? Many people seem to prefer it over Darktable
I tried it once a very long time ago. It was super slow and buggy. It’s easier to get used to Darktable quirks.
It’s very good and I prefer it to Darktable.
Photoshop is one i cannot shake too. If I need to make a graphic to post on social media for my shop, Photoshop does it. If I need to edit a picture, Photoshop.
I’ve had a pretty good experience using photopea as a photoshop replacement. Definitely not quite as powerful, but it has more than enough features for your average user
Consider Photoshop Elements for a similar UI and one time payment to use forever.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t know about that.
Also Photoshop, along with DxO PureRaw.
My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It’s unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
The Jetbrains suite of IDE’s. Particularly Jetbrains Rider. The platform ~~they are all ~~ many of them are built on is open source though, and you can get free licenses for all of their products if you are using them to develop open source software!
DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.
It’s fucking open source??? Does that me we can build from source to have it for free?
I have the last version you can use free forever (and I’m the reason they fixed it, by the way)
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
Why do you find jetbrains better than VS Code?
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But to be fair, the plugin capabilities for VS code are incredible. Of course its a lot more work but you can pretty much replicate the VS experience
Refactoring and code cleanup utilities in Rider are exceptional right now. And that’s not small. It’s massive in value.
Don’t get me wrong, I want codium to have this, but the extensions that compare, especially for .net, are not in the same league.
Sounds like I should give rider another try. Doing a lot of refactoring right now
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Yeah. My work machine is Windows and I haven’t even installed vs. Rider is just superior for the vast majority of .net work.
Msft needs to realize that they no longer own the best ide for their stack and do something to improve the .net vs code experience. That recent c# plugin needs a lot more power.
are there any good open source alternatives for VSCode for people that don’t want to learn emacs/vim? I’ve been looking for a good code editor to replace it but I haven’t been impressed elsewhere
VSCode is open (MIT) but it is packaged by MS to include some tracking/telemetry and they are distributed under a non-free license.
You can use VSCodium for a telemetry free and MIT licensed binary or you are free to build the source where the default config is no telemetry and MIT license.
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There is always Eclipse IDE. It’s not as polished as Jetbrain’s apps for sure but it’s still very capable. It’s published under the Eclipse Public License. I think the language server code that’s used in VSCode is from Eclipse, it can be used for developing many languages and there are lots of plugins and other add-ons to enhance the experience.
VS Code is not an IDE. There’s no comparison.
That’s a bit of a silly statement. Once you’ve installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included. Just because it’s modular and not “batteries included” doesn’t make it incomparable.
Have you ever used JetBrains products for any serious development?
Yes, I’ve made heavy use of PyCharm, IntelliJ and Datagrip and I’m a huge fan of them all.
Microsoft straight up says it’s not an IDE.
Sure. But I didn’t say it was either. I only pointed out that it’s silly to say “there’s no comparison”, when most functionality is easily achievable on both. And depending on language, it’s not even difficult.
Edit: In fairness, I did say “it’s effectively an IDE”, but I stand by the point that after a few extensions - what is the difference? If I can debug, refactor, and and get complete intellisense (including finding declarations etc), I’m doing more or less everything I would in a dedicated IDE.
Edit 2: I feel I’ve gone to far the other way. I have used am am aware of some of the capabilities that a fill fledged IDE has over something like VSCode. Especially for languages like those of the C-family. But I do take issue with implying they’re not comparable. For many usecases and languages, they’re totally comparable.
I guess it depends on your goals. I install Intellij, or WebStorm, or PyCharm, or RubyMine, and I get a working environment right out of the box. I don’t have to figure out what functionality is missing, then go search for the most maintained and up to date plugin, hoping that it has all the features I need. It just works. I use VS Code a lot, every day, but it’s sorely lacking, even with all of the plugins it has, in basic stuff like refactoring an entire codebase, or just regular old code cleanup. I’ll give a few examples, they might have equivalents in the vs code ecosystem, but I have not been able to find them.
- Inspect Code
In JB products I can choose Code > Inspect Code, from the menu bar, and have it show everything wrong with the project, including code that is never hit, code that is duplicated, Control Flow issues, Data Flow issues, typos, probable bugs, Security issues (including in your dependencies), migration aids, the list goes on and on and on. And it doesn’t just do it for one language in your repo, it does it for every file type. So you don’t have to install a plugin that finds security issues in your poms, and then one that finds them in package.json, and then another for your gemfile, etc.
- Structural Search and Replace
This one is quite hard to describe, so I’ll let the intellij docs explain it for me. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/structural-search-and-replace.html
A conventional search process does not take into account the syntax and semantics of the source code. Even if you use regular expressions, IntelliJ IDEA still treats your code as a regular text. The structural search and replace (SSR) actions let you search for a particular code pattern or grammatical construct in your code considering your code structure.
IntelliJ IDEA finds and replaces fragments of source code, based on the search templates that you create and conditions you apply.
There are a ton of things that I can’t find equivalents for in VS Code, but these are two major ones.
It’s that’s fine that you’ve got some examples of features that are more powerful in JB products. It would be a great shame if such a heavy and reasonably expensive program didn’t.
But I’m not arguing that VS Code is better or worse. I’m arguing that it is comparable (on the sense that it is worth of comparison). Which it is.
I agree that JB’s search is fantastic. Unmatched perhaps. All of that indexing it does when you open a project really pays off.
But you can get a lot of JB’s functionality in VS Code. You can get a very good code inspection in several languages, Python being the premier example. You can also get excellent docker integration, excellent linting, a reasonable search and replace across all files, and a top notch debugging experience for some languages (Python being the premier example again).
Sure JB products do some of that stuff better (at the cost of being heavier programs with significant start up time).
I use both. I like both. I believe VS Code is very formidable and could be the sole editor a developer uses flr many types of projects (Web Development, Python projects, many Go projects too all come to mind).
The most recent one is, of course, Sync for Lemmy. It may just be muscle memory at this point, but I find the experience a step improvement in browsing.
On my home server front, I would mention Plex despite Jellyfin’s massive improvements over the past 2 years. Plexamp is just a magical piece of software.
For the most part, though, I think I’d reverse the question. Most of the time, I prefer OSS.
Try reiverr, its a jellyfin ui made by a lemmy user that integrates with the arr suite and tvmd so you can easily find new things to watch https://github.com/aleksilassila/reiverr
It definitely looks promising, but I still don’t think Jellyfin and Reiverr are quite ready to compete with Plex yet.
I agree about Plex. But I don’t get the love for Sync.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks some features many of the other apps have. Personally, I’m liking Thunder right now, but I’m excited for Boost to come out.
Sync has ads unless you pay, it’s not open source, and I haven’t actually found anything superior about it.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks features many of the other apps have.
Care to mention some? I’ve used Thunder but I find it unbearably ugly and not as visually customizable as Sync.
It’s missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn’t big though, and most of them aren’t a big deal.
I’m not sure why you think Thunder is ugly though. The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
I was unable to get the font sizes right, to change only the base font to affect all proportions, and to colorize the indented comments the way I like them. Maybe I just wasn’t able to find the settings, though.
Fair enough.
That’s funny because I switched off of plex to Jellyfin because of how bad the experience on plex was.
Same here. And especially for watch parties Jellyfin has been great.
Such a cool feature to self host
Yep! Just need faster internet so I can share with more friends 😭
I use Navidrome over Jellyfin for music hosting. The open source music clients for the subsonic API are a little more varied.
If you’re happy using closed apps, Symfonium supports both Jellyfin and Subsonic.
I’m glad I used Infinity for Reddit, which was always FOSS, and there is now a new fork Eternity for Lemmy.
So i bought plex pass a while ago and i keep hearing about plexamp, I dont really understand why is it considered so good, could you elaborate on why you like it? Does it do more than play music from my home server?
I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I’ve still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I’ve found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.
I just switched from Plex to Jellyfin. Aside from a few minor features like intro skipping, I don’t miss it.
Whatsapp. Everyone in India uses it. Its like the imessage situation in the US. So widespread.
Schools, college, friend groups, family groups all are on whatsapp.
Can second this for Germany, too.
I tried to degoogle and to only use FOSS apps and services, but ditching WhatsApp would throw me in a black hole.
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I have ONE contact who uses Signal. Yes, it’s a shame but at this point I think that I could convert more people to using Linux than to switching to Signal.
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Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else’s but still.
Matrix bridge?
You don’t have to give contact permission to the app.
Cool instance you are on.
Thanks. May I ask what is so cool about the instance that I am on? ;)
Did not know we have our own instance
I can only speak for myself, but it’s nice to have more international presence here. Right now it’s mostly Anglos and other Europeans
there’s a kerala lemmy? thats neat
telegram is used a lot in slav countries, i feel like its pretty decent
Same in the Czech Republic. My whole family communicates only through whatsapp.
Same in France. Even (this is insane) for work coordination…
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So you prefer it because everyone use it? This doesn’t sound smart
How am I supposed to message people when the only messaging app they use is whatsapp and facebook messenger (which I don’t use)?
I guess the only easy alternative is to use SMS and email since everyone use it. But it is not safe.
I am always open to alternatives like Signal, Element,etc. But no one use them. I am not going to force people to use a messaging app.
As a workaround, you can bridge most services to Matrix. I currently bridge Telegram, Signal and SMS to my Matrix server and only need Element on my phone and desktop.
Unfortunately Element is fairly focused on business users, would be cool if they could host bridges for individuals to make the barrier of entry easier.
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There are no good open source CAD systems at all.
DaVinci Resolve is much better than any open source NLE. Generally, most closed source media production software is better than their open source counterparts except Blender. Blender is incredible and it gives me hope that other open source software can be just as successful in the media industry.
DaVinci is better, but it also provides licence for life. So it’s proprietary but have a good relationship with the customers.
‘Generally’ is a really wide word. Better for what? For who? When? That’s the all question…
Huh. DaVinci is OSS isn’t it?
No. It’s free to use for the standard version with most features available for free. There’s a paid “studio” license which unlocks all the features. Neither have their source code available for the public.
Lol you will find out its not when trying to install it on Linux. They only support CentOS, which actually doesnt exist anymore, and there is nearly no info about needed things. A Flatpak? No way. Appimage? Dream on.
I mean opening the install guide PDF file you got when you downloaded the installer from their website isn’t that hard.
In most cases, you only need to left-click the installer anyways so you will probably not need it. I just installed Resolve 18.5 on my Kubuntu laptop which worked very well except that Resolve apparently needs a dedicated GPU to work (at least on Linux, dunno about Windows).
A Flatpak would be welcome of course, but it’s not needed.
Btw they support Rocky Linux, Centos 8 and RHEL 8 but the installation works well on presumably every distro. For Rocky Linux, they even got an ISO for quick deployment and standardisation of the OS and Resolve in a company.
Don’t get fooled by what’s popular, open source it’s better by design and it’s there to stay. You can do color correction on Blender too
Dude, you’re completely ignoring the entire point of the post.
Youtube, it just has way more content than any libre platform
I still donate to Inkscape each month (please do the same at https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/), but it became unusable for me on macOS, unfortunately. I now use Serif Affinity.
Inkscape is fantastic on Linux. I’d highly recommend it!
MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.
I agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop. And it’s still more comfortable to use than Windows IMO (no forced updates that slow down the shutting down process!).
I agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop.
To me, that sort of “feature” is nothing more than a security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
Maybe I just think that because of past trauma from Microsoft products and IoT devices being blatantly insecure, but…
Photoshop, Fences, Plex, Steam, Unraid. I just highly prefer them to any alternatives I have tried. And believe me, I have tried every alternative to Photoshop and Fences that I could find. They just don’t do it. And because of those two in particular, I have to add Windows to the list.
Oh, and I guess Sync for Lemmy. The only reason I even know what Lemmy is, is the fact that the Sync for Reddit app stopped working and basically said, “Yeah, move to Lemmy, idiot.”
Jetbrains suite
Discord over Matrix. The range of features plus the style of the client. I like soundboard and emotes. its easy to setup a server and invite people.
At the start of the pandemic Discord had the killer feature unmatched: active voice room discovery. You could see where people where, and how many were talking at a glance before you joined a room.
That’s the single most useful feature of discord, but recently element integrated jitsi rooms and showed active participants. I think matrix is now good enough “enough” to replace discord.
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I find a lot of admins forget or neglect bridges which can be frustrating
Yeah I feel the same way. I just can’t get any matrix client to give me the same experience I get with discord. I know they’re two different programs, and that if I started with matrix, discord would be weird, but still. It’s annoying
You cannot setup servers on Discord.
While that is true, that’s also not what people mean when they say ‘servers’ in this context. No of course they’re not actual servers, but that’s what they’re called and I don’t think anyone is under the impression they’re actually servers
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Internally they are called guilds, but “publicly” they’re called servers. When you interact with the API you use
guilds, but the Discord client itself doesn’t use that term - it only uses “Server” as far as I can see.Server sounds better. Guilds sound dumb.
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