Looks like there’s a free demo, at least for now. (Part of the Next Fest?)

The one I use was discontinued years ago, so instead of recommending it, I’ll offer a suggestion:

Don’t look for “gaming” headsets. Look instead for well-regarded headphones and mic, or for a telephony (VoIP) headset from a brand that specializes in them, on sale. You’ll be more likely to find something that sounds good in both directions and lasts a long time.

How are you handling it?

I handle it by not using a rolling distro. I get security updates, but I’m not interrupted every time a new version of something becomes available. I do the periodic release upgrades on my own terms: when I have time.

And how are your experiences?

Wonderful. My system is very low maintenance, which means I have more time to get work done or play games.

Care to post the recipe?

My gaming groups use Matrix, mainly for its stronger ecosystem and better long-term outlook. Despite developing slowly and not yet doing everything we want, Matrix is consistently improving and growing to serve more and more use cases. We’re willing to tolerate some inconveniences for now, in exchange for having the contact networks we build today continue to grow for decades to come. We use Mumble for voice chat, because it’s great, but might switch to MatrixRTC when Element Call leaves beta and becomes available in more Matrix clients.

I recently wrote up a few tips for Discord users considering Matrix.

If chat for a small gaming group was all I needed, I might choose XMPP. It’s arguably easier to administer than Matrix once you learn about all the XEPs required for comparable features (ease of admin is relevant to me because I self-host) and I would be able to guide a small group through client choices and setup. But I have found XMPP’s ecosystem to be a poor fit for large and diverse contact networks.

You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago.

No, I said I haven’t seen a single one of those errors in more than a few months. I haven’t been tracking the timeline, but I’m pretty sure the fixes were being put in place closer to a year ago.

I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it

When we choose to publish old experiences instead of gathering updated information first, it’s important to also state when those experiences were, so readers can take it into account. Things are constantly changing in this field. (Mostly for the better, I think.)

In any case, thanks for clarifying, and thanks in advance for adjusting your spiel now that you’ve been made aware that your information was out of date.

One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links

I think I’ve seen invite links being proposed for Matrix, but I don’t remember the status of that idea, and can’t find a relevant MSC at the moment.

This bot looks like it could be helpful for now:

https://github.com/dfuchss/matrix-joinlink

https://www2.matrix.org/blog/2024/05/24/this-week-in-matrix-2024-05-24/#matrixjoinlink

I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly,

Slow at what, exactly? If you mean slow at delivering messages, it suggests that you were using the world’s largest public server, which sometimes gets overloaded enough to be slow. In that case, your criticism is not of Matrix, but of a particular server. To compare apples to apples, you would have to either pick a different server or compare the largest one with a similarly loaded XMPP server.

it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to,

When was that? Which clients were in use? This is relevant because unable-to-decrypt errors were fairly common until roughly mid-to-late last year. They put a lot of work into finding and addressing the causes, and I haven’t seen a single one in more than a few months. I suspect the experience you’re describing here is either out of date, or you’re using clients that haven’t applied the fixes yet.

I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks, while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options, is a somewhat misleading way to do it… and a disservice to the community.

Do what? Get another program’s secrets? Just ask the d-bus interface for them.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/secret-service/latest/

Alternatively, eavesdrop on d-bus when secrets are being stored or retrieved.

man dbus-monitor

e) on Linux, the security benefits are mostly outweighed by the security drawbacks.

The d-bus interface used by those wallets/keyrings has no security at all. Secrets passed over it are in plain view of any spyware that decides to look, and since it’s a well-known interface, it’s a much easier target than secrets stored in separate files with application-specific locations.

I wish Klei hadn’t sold out to Tencent.

Friendly reminder that archive.org still exists, and doesn’t DDoS, CAPTCHA, or reveal your reading habits to Google.

Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times.

And leaded gasoline was one of the most widely used fuels of all time. That doesn’t mean we should still be using it.

You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.

Ah, yes… the dismissive opinion of someone who hasn’t had to do the work to clean up messes caused by the broken design. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when looking back upon the time I’ve spent helping people in your position.

Lemmy doesn’t offer a community-specific NSFW filter. It’s all or nothing, and “NSFW” is a broad category that includes other things in other communities that people do want to continue seeing.

Would it make sense to ban NSFW communities here, and let them start a separate announcement community for those?

I guess you’ve never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game’s .esp data.

If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don’t concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can’t help it, because the engine’s modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what’s needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It’s a bloody awful design.

I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don’t glorify Creation Engine in this area. What’s under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.

As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.

Aye. Which reinforces what I wroot.

I prefer not to give those people any attention at all.

What do you mean by PnP in this context?

Here are some tabletop games that can be played solo:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2819/solo-solitaire-game/linkeditems/boardgamemechanic?pageid=1&sort=rank

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈdiː.mən/
• Rhymes: -iːmən
• Hyphenation: dae‧mon

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/daemon

Rhymes

• daemon, demon
• freeman
• seaman
• Seaman (surname - see especially David Seaman)
• semen

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/iːmən