Last straw with Discord
Apr. 20th, 2017 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
So, when I woke up this afternoon, I opened my laptop to find... a blue screen of death. One caused by the Discord app. I ended up losing about an hour's worth of work in Word for my troubles.
To be honest, I'm tired of Discord fucking up every system of mine that it touches. It's very clear the thing was intended to be a web app, and its use of Electron instead of native code shows that. Electron has the same problem as Chrome, though: poor memory management, which causes memory usage to accumulate almost endlessly. That leak's been there for a LONG time, and it shows through loud and clear with Discord.
Of course, that's not even counting the times Discord has taken priority for my sound and video, causing all sorts of problems while I'm...you know, GAMING!
Skype has never had this problem, nor have IRC, XMPP, Mumble, TeamSpeak... Note that THREE of those have voice chat (Jingle for XMPP), and all of them have both private and group chat capabilities. IRC, XMPP, and Mumble are also open source, and can be set up rather easily. There are also a craptonne of clients for IRC and XMPP to choose from, where there's only one Discord, Skype, and TeamSpeak client respectively.
Sadly, in the end. it all comes down to what other people use, and most people want the "easy" route. Discord is much more user-friendly (for most people), just as Skype was. For me, though... Discord is virtually unusable.
And for those who say "well, Skype is unusable for me!", my suggestion is to not silo yourself to one or two closed chat solutions. Not everyone can use Discord, just as not everyone can use Telegram. If you're going to silo yourself like that, please pick something more open, where everyone who wants to use it has a choice of what applications they can use. It makes things less painful on everyone trying to contact you.