I think your opinion is disrespectful towards artists. It implies that they don’t deserve to be compensated for their work and consequently that their profession is less worthy. Why art specifically? What sets their product apart from other goods?
Like, never ever? Could I turn off my main device for a month and continue using the desktop app? Can I even register new accounts on the desktop app?
Being centralized isn’t the only reason, but basically yes. The concept behind the protocol is simpler because your decryption keys only ever live on one device. You don’t really have the entire trust (and key sharing) model for devices that Matrix has. Signal’s desktop app works very similarly to WhatsApp where your single main device needs to be connected at least intermittently for “guest” sessions to be able to send and receive messages. I haven’t used Signal desktop though, that was just the impression I got from it. Would make sense though because WhatsApp is allegedly borrowing from Signal’s protocol quite a bit.
It is just closer to WhatsApp. What Matrix does, especially with regards to enabling true multi-device support, is quite complex overall and sometimes causes issues with keys for decrypting messages not arriving on all devices. Signal is more limited but it just works a lot better. Small but important extra: Signal supports fully encrypted voice and video chats.
Full disclosure: I personally also prefer Matrix because I use it with multiple devices. I don’t want to install desktop apps for these services and Element runs in the browser while Signal does not.
You can do something similar without any addons. Firefox allows selection of multiple tabs at once out of the box, and you can have it create bookmarks for this selection. You can then have it open all bookmarks in a bookmark folder at once.
Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That’s not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.
It enables incoming connections for devices in a NAT (i.e. for devices that all share the same IP address like in a VPN for example). Say your iPhone and your Laptop are both using your local wifi, then they both share the same public IP of your router. If I try to reach your laptop specifically, I have no way of telling your router to send my request to your laptop instead of your iPhone or the router itself. You can now tell your router to forward port 80 for example to your laptop specifically, so if I send a request to your public IP address on port 80, the router knows to forward it to your laptop.
Without port forwarding, only your PC can open connections to servers and only then can servers send data back to your PC (because the router keeps track of open connections and “temporarily” forwards the port of your open connection to you).
If you wish to run a website for example, you need to have ports forwarded. And torrenting works a lot better with it as well because people can contact you to send you the data you’re looking for. Otherwise you’d have to ask everybody by yourself, so to speak. And it’s more effective to “leave a note” for others to find and then contact you based on, because some of the peers might not want to be contacted or don’t have forwarded ports themselves.
Getting a bit more technical, “ports” are a transport layer (layer 4) concept. Other protocols may use different addressing schemes on top of the IP addresses, but most common ones like TCP and UDP for example use ports.
Linus is just such a treat. Love the guy.
I see, thank you!