• 10 Posts
  • 541 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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    1. Signal
    2. XMPP
    3. Matrix

    In that order. I self-host both XMPP and Matrix, and I wouldn’t want to stop using matrix. Spaces, arbitrary amounts of self-chats, and so on are great. I use matrix every day.

    But for chatting… It sooner or later fails you. It’s slow. Notifications break. Messages are shown as sent, but somehow do not appear in the recipient’s devices until TWO WEEKS LATER (yeah IDK, happened twice already, in different chats and directions. Best part is, I’m not even federated!). Encryption is great IF YOU KNOW SOME CRYPTOGRAPHY BASICS, and utterly confusing otherwise.

    XMPP just works. Especially the calls, holy shit, I had to fight Matrix for so long to make voice and video calls work, and xmpp just… Works. Notifications are way more reliable (as in, have been absolutely perfect). I really like monocles as a chat app on Android. (The downside is: can’t decrypt old messages on new devices, and desktop clients are ugly.)

    So why Signal above XMPP?

    Because it’s not your fault should something ever break in a vital service. Also the encryption and privacy afforded by it a great.


  • I’ll second Pocket-ID.

    I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

    Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)












  • 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.