Disclaimer: I host and use XMPP. I like using it.

That being said: the question isn’t if there’s any client, the question is if there’s a good client.

And my god, do XMPP clients suck ass. At best, they’re decent (monocles comes to mind, for example), but I actively loathe interacting with Linux desktop XMPP clients. There’s not a single one that is competently designed, or rather, they are all so fucking bare-bones and ugly looking.

“But that doesn’t matter!” yes it does shut the fuck up.

99% of the population doesn’t give a shit if you support the latest OMEMO spec or are written in memory safe rust or whatever else.

It takes a a fraction of a second to realize “this client sucks” and at most an additional minute to figure out “…and it’s not suited to my use-case”.

I also host matrix and use it extensively on all my devices. There actually are nice clients, and even some Discord-likes. But a) the protocol is so horrible, I’m not sure reinventing the wheel can be called a bad thing, and b) I want to cry once a week at least when using it. Why do my old messages not load today? Why does my message show as sent two weeks ago (!), but only arrived now (!) despite having sent plenty of messages both directions in between? Why are all of my messages marked as “can’t verify authenticity” on about half my devices, but not the other, a bug that has been open for YEARS with hundreds of complaints and pleas to at least reduce the danger-signaling indicator since it indicates “insecure!” to non-expert users, with zero maintained response? And this is just for myself, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck supporting matrix for friends & family. I mean, I am doing that, but fuuuuuuuuck thaaaaat.

Fluxer allows us to tell friends and family “here try this, it’s just like discord but no corporate bullshit!”, and they can open the app and go “oh yeah that is like Discord. Ok, sure, we can try using that instead”.

It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

IDK.

It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications?

This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you…

Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all.

How do I completely disable it forever?

To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask <servicename>.service

The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

Neovim, configured entirely through nixvim. I always liked neovim, but it’s never been as incredibly stable as now with nixvim.

Main/only IDE both in private and at work. Can’t ever go back, muscle memory has ensured that.

If you use nixos, you basically have to know/learn/use day-to-day the nix language.

nixpkgs are written using nix the language, using concepts mostly familiar from just using nixos.

Basically everyone using nixos is capable of contributing packages.

Ah, sorry. https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Just gonna leave this here

That’s what I’m not so sure about though. Forgejo/codeberg/… projects are already not hard to find through search engines. Add a federated in-forgejo search and you’d be set there.

And currently the problem indeed is that a forgejo project is on instance X, and you, as a developer only have accounts on Y and Z. But through federation, that would stop mattering, so I don’t get the “it’s where contributors are”: as long as contributors have a single forgejo account anywhere, we’d be good.

Yep yep yep. I have forgejo accounts on so many instances (including on my own, 2-person instance which hosts all my personal shit). I’d love to be able to jump into discussions and open PRs on other people’s forges without needing a new account.

Forgejo in particular is just a fantastic forge. It’s surprisingly feature-rich, and so, so fast compared to GitHub, even on very lowspecced hardware. I honestly think that if federation is properly implemented, then in the long run, GitHub will become obsolete for FOSS projects.

Don’t forget the almighty:

journalctl -fu <servicename>

And yes, I am always reading that as “fuck you, service”.

Company went “here’s your budget for ordering a laptop. Put on it whatever you want”, and so there’s NixOS running on it :)

(To be fair though: small-ish, tech focused company)

Another recmendation for Actual. I spend very little time having to interact with it, because after the initial setup, all transactions are now synched from my bank accounts, and 90% are automatically classified into my categories (not by “AI” or something, you just set rules like “payments to Rewe are always groceries”).

No, not really. The imperativity of ansible vs the declarativity of nix actually does make a big difference in practice.

Grew up on it. My dad set up a Ubuntu 4.10 PC for my brother and I when we were 3/5 (no internet, obv), and it stuck.

Used Windows for a brief time in highschool to be able to play online with friends.

Went right back to Linux when going to university. Will never change back, both for ideological reasons and because Linux is just better.

Next step: NixOS on a phone

Alright, thanks for the info, that’s good to know. Trying to make the jump becomes more enticing every day.

Thanks for sharing! Sounds about as good/bad as I was expecting. How’s the browser experience? Also, are there any features/tweaks you are aware of that you could not get through Nix, that the more “commercial” Linux device manufacturers have developed for their devices?

Holy crap! A NixOS-on-phone user in the wild! You are rocking my dream setup. How’s your experience been with it? Is it remotely daily drivable for phone things?

How exactly does Free, non-open-source software prevent that?

Think about it like this:

• with ansible, you are responsible for making sure that executing the described steps in the described order leads to the desired result

• with nix, you describe what you want your system to look like, and then figuring out how to get there is nix’s problem (or rather, is obvious to nix thanks to nixpkgs)