Kevin's musings

I’m not usually one to say bad things about… well, anything, but more and more people I interact with lately have been using google chat at their preferred communication medium and I have been asked a few times why I dislike it, so I thought I would do a blog post on it and can then just point people here.

First a few pros before any cons:

• It works fine in firefox as far as I have seen
• It’s included in “google workspace’, so if you have that you have google chat too.
• It looks ok. Links, emojis, reactions, links, videos all look/work fine.
• It’s easy to start a chat with multiple people or groups
• All your chat history is there on restart (but see below)
• It’s encrypted (but no idea if google can read all the history or not)

And now all the actual current cons:

• It’s a browser only application. If I don’t remember to reload that tab after rebooting, it’s just not there and I get no notices. Needless to say: no 3rd party applications have a chance to do better than the web interface.
• It’s thread model is utter junk. There are ‘threads’ of conversation, but they are all in the same linear timeline, so its really really hard to tell or notice if someone added something to an old thread without knowing you need to scroll back up to it.
• It’s horribly “unreliable”. By this I mean I could have the app loaded in my browser and _still_ not see notifications because: google is randomly asking me to login again, google chat decides to put <— and 100 more lines here –> collapsed section, google chat randomly decides to put “and 10 more messages” button at the bottom, Someone could have started a new thread and the one you care about has any of the above happen to it and you never know.
• Someone you are messaging could just not use google chat or be busy or away. Google chat will helpfully mail them about your message… but 12 hours later. You can also say you are ‘busy’ but only for 8 hours at a time. If you are gone for a week, too bad.
• Surprisingly search is kind of bad. It finds things you search for, but there’s no way to go to the ‘next’ match or see how many or navigate at all in it.
• Related to search, there’s no way to have logs locally to use unix tools on like grep, etc.
• There’s a indicator of how many messages are unread in a room/chat, but no indications if thats just general or if someone mentioned your name.
• No good keyboard navigation, you have to click around to change channels, threads, conversations, etc.
• Unless you have been invited, it’s virtual impossible to find rooms. There’s a ‘browse rooms’ dialog, but it only lets you search in the room name, not description or who is in what room or anything.
• Depending on how things are configured, you may not be able to chat with everyone, only people in your company or workspace.
• You can adjust notifications per room somewhat, but it’s not as flexible as any IRC client. You can notify on everything, or on just mentions of your name, or mentions of your name and every new thread or nothing. No way to look for keywords or anything.

And of course there’s potential future cons:

• google changes chat products more than a bakery changes it’s day old bread. Is this iteration of google chat going to stick around? Who knows? Could be a completely rebranded and different one next week. ;(

So, all in all, I will use google chat if I have to, but it’s going to be my least favorite chat method and I wish everyone would switch to something else. Matrix perhaps?

Greetings everyone. I thought I would just write up a quick post on some current status and tips and information around running Fedora on pine64 pinephones.

First, let me talk about scaling. One of the problems putting a desktop OS into a small screen on a phone is scaling. Phosh (a librem started gnome-shell replacement for small screens) and Phoc (a mutter/window manager replacement that works with Phosh do there best with this issue. There’s a setting to try and resize all windows from all applications, and a way to do it on a case by case basis, however many applications are just not friendly to small screens. They refuse to shrink below a point, or they cut off valuable parts. I guess this might be something thats best solved upstream at the toolkit level, but it’s a hard problem. By default Phosh sets 200% scaling on the pinephone as well. It all depends on how small a screen/type you can handle, but lowering that gets more applications usable. You can do so via: ‘wlr-randr –output DSI-1 –scale 1.25’ for 125% for example. This also makes it harder to press buttons, so beware. 🙂

Next some great news. The latest round of uboot updates in Fedora Rawhide get my 3GB pinephone booting from a stock rawhide workstation image. Things boot, the display comes up, gnome comes up (and is really difficult to use, see above scaling issue). There’s no net, no modem, no camera, etc, but the display and the base boot chain all works great. Many thanks to Peter Robinson for getting those patches in!

A short note about flatpaks: I installed some flatpaks from flathub, and they work just dandy. The Fedora flatpak registry should soon also be advertising all it’s flatpaks for aarch64 as well. This is a great step for us down the road when we start working on a ostree version.

On the remix front, more things are getting reviewed and added to Fedora repos. chatty (sms/mms/matrix/jabber) client just finished review. There’s only a few more things on the list, but then the big one: The kernel patches. Hopefully we can find some folks to help us upstream things so we can get a vanilla fedora kernel usable. Even just getting in the patches for wifi or modem would be a great help (allowing you to ssh in and apply updates).

I’m still not using mine as a daily driver yet, there’s stil some important things not there that I need:

• MMS handling (in progress via a mmsd and chatty, but not there yet). For those in EU, in the US all group chats and anything with media uses MMS (at least on my carrier)
• The camera now works, but it’s still really not good at all. I’m hoping for improvements.
• There’s so far no good otp app packaged up. Will have to look at them and package up the best one.
• Lots of small stuff thats nice, but not urgent: the torch mode, auto rotation, docking detection

But a number of things are looking better:

• Sound works fine along with bluetooth and gpodder, so podcasts are good. (Side note: if you set the dip switch for serial console, it messes up the audio, you need to reset it back to get working audio. 😉
• epiphany works pretty well here as a web browser. Resizes nicely and is pretty fast.
• neochat seems the best of the matrix clients here (but chatty is adding matrix support, so will be interesting to see that)
• newsflash works pretty great for rss reading (although you have to actually read each article to mark it as read. The android tt-rss reader I am using on my android phone lets you just scroll by things to mark them read.
• gnome-maps seems to work fine, except no GPS. There’s some AGPS upload song and dance I haven’t looked into yet. Hopefully that can get automated so it works out of the box.
• tootle works fine for mastodon.
• cawbird works ok if I don’t give up twitter entirely.

Finally a few hardware related notes:

• In case you missed out on any of the community edition pinephones, the “Beta edition” should be open for preorders on March 24th: https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/19/beta-edition-pre-orders/ This is the same hardware as the later community editions (1.2) at the same price. 🙂
• There should be in a few months a keyboard for the pinephone. It will be a big honking battery case, so in addition to a hardware keyboard you will get a large battery too. Even though battery life has been pretty good having that extra battery will be very nice. I definitely plan to get one.
• Finally, and I can’t stress how much I still find this cool and amusing: The modem on the phonephone is a armv7 SOC. You can even run linux on it (The postmarketos folks are making a distribution for it). So wild to see a armv7 processor to just run the modem. How far we have come.

If you’re interested in the pinephone (or any other linux mobility projects), come join us on #fedora-phone on freenode or matrix or telegram.

Recently the Fedora Council has been floating the idea of modernizing the Fedora community real-time chat platform (currently IRC hosted at freenode.net). The front runner is matrix. I last looked at matrix 4 or so years ago, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit it and see how it looks today.

TLDR: I suspect we will have IRC and Matrix bridged together for a long time to come, if you are new user, use Matrix, if not keep using IRC.

First a few words about IRC (Internet Relay Chat). IRC is a 30+ year old chat protocol. There’s tons of clients. There’s tons of bots and add-ons. There’s tons of gateways and aggregators. So, whats not to like? Well, everything is a add-on mish mash that can be very confusing and frustrating for new users. For example, IRC has no persistance, you only see messages while your client is connected. So, folks invented irc “bouncers” to connect for you to the IRC networks you care about and when you reconnect play back all the messages you missed. Authentication is via messaging various services bots. Encryption is via plugins or other add ons (and often not setup). So, most old timers have a client they have carefully tuned, a bouncer and a bunch of custom bots, which is fine, but new users (not surprisingly) find this all a hassle and frustrating. IRC also has it’s own culture and rituals, some of which still make sense to me, but others that don’t.

Matrix on the other hand is pretty new (6 years). You can interact with it as a guest or have an account on a particular homeserver. If you have an account all your history is saved, and can be synced to your client on login. You can send pictures and moves and fancy gifs. You can (somewhat) have end to end encryption (see clients below) with encrypted rooms where the server can’t know what was said in the room. You can have ‘reactions’ to things people say. You can redact something you said in the past. You can have a nice avatar and a Real Name (if you like). You can join rooms/conversations with other matrix servers (for example the kde, mozilla and others are running servers). You can get read receipts to see who read your message and notifications when someone is typing (also client dependent see below).

Finally there’s matrix <–> IRC bridges. These allow conversations to be relayed from one side to another. Of course some things don’t translate over at all (reactions, receipts, typing notification, avatars) and some look different (if someone in matrix posts a picture, the people on IRC accross the bridge will see a link to the picture). The main text of the conversation is properly relayed to both sides.

I managed to re-setup my matrix homeserver (matrix.scrye.com) from 4 years ago. Ran into a little problem with the version of matrix-synapse in Fedora (It’s too old to federate right, so I built the new one and the other update thats blocking it. Hopefully that blockage will be fixed soon). It’s still a memory hog, but it runs well enough. They are working on the next generation server written in go (dentrite), but it still lacks a lot of features.

After that it was on to testing clients. There’s a bunch more available than there used to be, which is great. The documentation on them is pretty much missing for most of the clients (exception: element has docs).

The premier client is element (used to be riot). It’s available as a web app, an android app and a native linux app (which isn’t available except direct from them that I could find). The web app and android app are likely the most full featured of the clients. They support setting up client encryption and cross signing your connections so all of them can read the same encrypted rooms. For chat clients, I really prefer stand alone, as web apps have a lot of issues (not restarting on browser restart, notifications not working right, poor integration into the desktop, etc).

Fractal is the gnome native client, available as a flatpak. My impression: full screen is horrible as the chat text is centered in a small col in the middle. No way to adjust the text size or font, making it really small and non readable by me. On the plus side, it does have a ‘take me to next room with unread messages’ key, which is really nice.

nheko is a QT client with a mix of features implemented, it’s available as a rpm packaged in Fedora. My impression: Looks pretty nice, nice to be able to tag rooms into groups. Looks good full screen. There’s only really a “this room has unread messages in it”, not any indicator of _how many_ and no easy way to go to the next room with unread in it (that I could figure out). No docs at all anywhere that I could find. 🙁

Quaternion is another QT client with a mix of features implemented. No end to end encryption, but lots of the other features. It’s also available in Fedora as a rpm. My impression: looks pretty nice, lets you tag rooms and seperates them easily. Doesn’t seem to have a ‘go to next unread room’ function. ;( No docs.

spectral is a c++ client. Its packaged in Fedora, but it seems to crash on launch for me, so I didn’t get much chance to look it over. ;(

FluffyChat is a port of a native android matrix client. It’s pretty full featured and available as a flatpak. Does the chat sort of ‘sms’ style, which is cute and all, and fine for small rooms, but bad for larger discussions and such. Otherwise looks outstanding and is really fast!

Neochat is another QT client available as a rpm in Fedora. I had to tinker with my server setup and get /.well-known/matrix/client and server working before I could get neochat connecting. After that it connected fine, it was really fast, but

All of the clients seemed to handle basic chatting and history fine. Other features are all over the map. Element was the only one I saw with a search feature (to search the history). None of them had logging, which I guess could be mooted at least partly by a good search of the history/backlog. Element was the only one that seemed to have the url previews working (where the server fetches them for you and shows a preview in the client). I am not sure why so many of the clients are using QT, perhaps because kde is running their own matrix server?

So, as far as clients, I’m really missing easy ways to go to the next room with unread messages in most of them (I use this ALLLLLLLLLLLLL the time in hexchat). Logging/searching is really important to me too. I often have to look up what happened back on day X or see the exact command I used to solve something a year ago.

If you’re a new user/contributor these days I think it completely makes sense to just use a matrix client. You get history without having to deal with a bouncer and some nice other features and you can bridge to all the old fogeys on IRC. If Fedora gets it’s own home server this will be even easier (as I assume you will just be able to use your fedora account to login and create an account for you).

The real question is how long should we keep the current situation with Matrix and IRC bridged? What advantages would be dropping the irc bridges bring? Right now, not too much. End to end encryption isn’t that interesting for an open source project. Reactions are interesting (think about using them to vote up or down proposals in meetings?), but we have done without them so far. I think migration from IRC is going to be a long process, nor is there great advantage to pushing things to go faster. I hope that over coming years matrix clients continue to get better and implement more features. Someday (probably years down the road) more Fedora users will be on Matrix than IRC, then sometime after that things will have shifted enough that the community will start assuming you are on Matrix.

I have also a few other things I use my existing IRC client with: a bitlbee server to pull in other IM/twitter/etc, and a few old IRC servers that I still hang out in, so it probably doesn’t make sense for me to move over to matrix full time yet.

One additional thought: we have several IRC bots that do various things on IRC. Matrix has a handful of bots, but nothing like IRC. It’s practically a programming rite of passage to make a IRC bot. 🙂 I think we could safely look at starting design on bots for our needs for matrix and switch to them when ready (but again, no hurry at all here).