Good for you for not having any problems mate! I’m sure this invalidates the parent poster’s problems.

Kolanki, that dude is everywhere!

Any particular problems you’re having or have you briefly used Pidgin in 2008 and think nothing has improved since then?

XMPP. It just works, requires very little resources, is stable and has decent clients.

I would go with Snikket instead of Prosody if I had been starting now.

Conversations on phones, Dino or Gajim on PCs, plus a conversejs install on the xmpp server, to allow web access when needed.

Conversations is easy for the family to figure out.

This whole thread is depressing to read, full of corporate bootlickers putting blame on you.

I use bittorrent for isos and the files usually have hundreds of seeds. They are used.

Same for Armbian.

Sounds like phpmyadmin lol

They fucking what? I need to get off the couch and cancel my support too

Not to tell you you don’t need a GUI calculator program, but the only times I needed one was on screen sharing when I had to show someone else what I’m doing.

For all other cases, python in console is the best calculator ever. You don’t need to learn Python to use it, and it’s most likely already installed in most systems that you use.

Ad. 2, have you seen https://www.zombietrackergps.net/ztgps/ ?

Then yes, learning Ansible is a good way to have base OS settings for your systems. I love that it’s agentless - works over SSH.

The ugly part is that they keep updating it in a backwards incompatible way. In one version the paramerer is called “file” and in another it’s “dest”, they pull shit like this and don’t provide a tool to update playbooks automatically.

But updating is rather optional.

It’s crazy, given that all these devices have something powerful like an esp32, isn’t it?

I’ve done some of my home stuff this way, but I had to program it myself. Tasmota has some features which can be used without a server, but that’s just for simple stuff like switches. For whatever reason (simplicity for non tech people?), out of the box products don’t work this way.

If you don’t have days of spare time, you buy ready made products and set them up in minutes in Home Assistant

Additionally, libraries for XMPP exist in most languages, there is a varying degree of completeness, but they all do a good job of hiding XML from the programmer

Thos, exactly this. Whenever I ask the question OP asked, it’s always some people who used some ancient client in 2008 and never bothered to try again. And then Matrix came to existence with their marketing and they happily started using it, even though it didn’t have any better features

Your hackernews post and the fact you mention Pidgin shows that you haven’t used xmpp in the last 10 years. By the time Matrix was first released, xmpp had history sync.

Which is why I can’t wrap my head around why a second protocol with no features that didn’t already exist in XMPP took over.

The more they grow, the busier the spectrum will be. I really hope it doesn’t grow too much.

I wrote my masters in LaTeX and while I appreciate the structuredness and the fact I could use vim, it was so quirky. Having to spend half an hour to fix a non obvious compile error, more than once, was a big distractor. I’m sure it gets better when you use it more but I don’t think I have ever used it since. I’m not in academia and I don’t need to solve compile problems when creating an invoice or writing a letter to local government.

Matrix came 15 years after XMPP, so the question should be: why is Matrix preferable? Does it bring anything to the table, other than fragmentation?

Also, thr emulated Android web browser runs much smoother than any native one

As an example of what’s possible with GPT4. Client wanted DNS auth in Letsencrypt instead of HTTPS, so we can close incoming port 80. They’re using a registar with a proprietary API. With ChatGPT I created a certbot plugin in about 10 minutes, feeding it a pdf with API description.

I know how to do every step of this myself, but it’s a 4-8 hour task to research the registar’s API and how certbot plugins interface. Instead, I took another 15 minutes to review the code, ran it, and it’s done.