Hello everyone, I would like to suggest we set up a Mumble server for Arch Linux staff. Time and time again, it's been useful for Arch people to come together for a longer time to hack on various projects or to plan stuff like Arch Summit. Often times, people use Jitsi for such things. However, I think Mumble is a more suitable alternative for people hanging out for a longer time as it: - allows you to have multiple channels for dedicated topics and you can see who's currently meeting where - is more stable than Jitsi in my experience - has better desktop integration for muting - has better quality - can more easily be used over slow networks The idea is to use mumble-server, put it on the smallest Hetzner VPS and call it a day. I've been operating Mumble servers for years and it requires maintenance basically never. We cannot connect it to SSO so we'll run it like we run the IRC channels: have a password and ask people to not tell people outside of staff. We'll have a bunch of moderators (not necessarily devops, just whoever wants to do create some channels now and then) that can set up channels and such but apart from that I think we can just run it. Thoughts? Sven
Hi, On 25/10/2024 10:41, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:
Hello everyone,
I would like to suggest we set up a Mumble server for Arch Linux staff.
Time and time again, it's been useful for Arch people to come together for a longer time to hack on various projects or to plan stuff like Arch Summit. Often times, people use Jitsi for such things. However, I think Mumble is a more suitable alternative for people hanging out for a longer time as it: - allows you to have multiple channels for dedicated topics and you can see who's currently meeting where - is more stable than Jitsi in my experience - has better desktop integration for muting - has better quality - can more easily be used over slow networks
Mumble lacks video which can be really nice as one can share their screen or actually visually see someone talking. So I think it is worth it to go the extra mile and propose a solution in that direction. Matrix is as far as I know can do P2P video calls one on one and is working on multi person video meetings. My preference would be to have integrated there, question arises if we can easily invite outsiders.
On 2024-10-25 11:12:19 (+0200), Jelle van der Waa wrote:
Hi,
On 25/10/2024 10:41, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:
Hello everyone,
I would like to suggest we set up a Mumble server for Arch Linux staff.
Time and time again, it's been useful for Arch people to come together for a longer time to hack on various projects or to plan stuff like Arch Summit. Often times, people use Jitsi for such things. However, I think Mumble is a more suitable alternative for people hanging out for a longer time as it: - allows you to have multiple channels for dedicated topics and you can see who's currently meeting where - is more stable than Jitsi in my experience - has better desktop integration for muting - has better quality - can more easily be used over slow networks
Mumble lacks video which can be really nice as one can share their screen or actually visually see someone talking.
So I think it is worth it to go the extra mile and propose a solution in that direction. Matrix is as far as I know can do P2P video calls one on one and is working on multi person video meetings. My preference would be to have integrated there, question arises if we can easily invite outsiders.
Hm, that doesn't help the situation at this point in time though. The element.io announcement about easy-to-use and scaleable video conferencing [1] is from 2022, is invite only (is it still?) and appears to suffer from the same limitations as webRTC (the connections do not scale for "larger" groups). Mumble is something that we can use right now (albeit without video conferencing) without issue on all platforms and is very low maintenance (in comparison to jitsi, matrix with jitsi [2] and/or waiting for matrix to have proper conference calls). While I agree, that we should long-term strive for something that can do video conferencing as well, I see no reason to not use mumble in the meantime (especially as it seems to help in work coordination across projects). Best, David [1] https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/ [2] https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/blob/develop/docs/jitsi.md -- https://sleepmap.de
On 25.10.24 11:12, Jelle van der Waa wrote:
Hi,
On 25/10/2024 10:41, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:
Hello everyone,
I would like to suggest we set up a Mumble server for Arch Linux staff.
Time and time again, it's been useful for Arch people to come together for a longer time to hack on various projects or to plan stuff like Arch Summit. Often times, people use Jitsi for such things. However, I think Mumble is a more suitable alternative for people hanging out for a longer time as it: - allows you to have multiple channels for dedicated topics and you can see who's currently meeting where - is more stable than Jitsi in my experience - has better desktop integration for muting - has better quality - can more easily be used over slow networks
Mumble lacks video which can be really nice as one can share their screen or actually visually see someone talking.
So I think it is worth it to go the extra mile and propose a solution in that direction. Matrix is as far as I know can do P2P video calls one on one and is working on multi person video meetings. My preference would be to have integrated there, question arises if we can easily invite outsiders.
Video and screenshare would be great but I don't currently know a channel-based solution except for Discord that supports that. We could use Discord instead for this purpose but I think in this community that's generally frowned upon and so I didn't even bring that up. Other voice-only solutions that I know of that are channel-based are Ventrilo and Teamspeak but I don't think they are good contenders either as they have no advantages over Mumble. I don't particularly like Mumble but I do thinks it's the best we have in the FOSS space. I looked into the Matrix-based solutions and as far as I can tell, it's not what we're looking for either. There is element-call [0][1] which is explicit calling (and looks somewhat early in development) and then there is Jitsi integration in Element [2] but it seems to share the normal limitations of Jitsi such as no push-to-talk and no configurable silence threshold on top of not _really_ being a voice channel (in the sense of Discord or Mumble). There is Revolt [3] which is an AGPL Discord clone but when I looked at it in the past, it was somewhat complex to operate and I thought the development was a bit sketchy. I'm not sure I'd want to operate this under the Arch umbrella. With those arguments and other solutions on the table, I would like to reaffirm my suggestion to run an Arch Linux Mumble server. Cheers, Sven [0] https://github.com/element-hq/element-call [1] https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/ [2] https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/blob/develop/docs/jitsi.md [3] https://github.com/revoltchat/
Hi, I will add my two cents as well. I think it worth to check Mattermost [0]. It supports audio calls, file and screen sharing. Cosmic DE (System76) developers are using it. [0] https://mattermost.com/ Best wishes, Aleksandr Razdolski On Oct 25, 2024, at 4:34 PM, Sven-Hendrik Haase <svenstaro@archlinux.org> wrote: On 25.10.24 11:12, Jelle van der Waa wrote: Hi, On 25/10/2024 10:41, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote: Hello everyone, I would like to suggest we set up a Mumble server for Arch Linux staff. Time and time again, it's been useful for Arch people to come together for a longer time to hack on various projects or to plan stuff like Arch Summit. Often times, people use Jitsi for such things. However, I think Mumble is a more suitable alternative for people hanging out for a longer time as it: - allows you to have multiple channels for dedicated topics and you can see who's currently meeting where - is more stable than Jitsi in my experience - has better desktop integration for muting - has better quality - can more easily be used over slow networks Mumble lacks video which can be really nice as one can share their screen or actually visually see someone talking. So I think it is worth it to go the extra mile and propose a solution in that direction. Matrix is as far as I know can do P2P video calls one on one and is working on multi person video meetings. My preference would be to have integrated there, question arises if we can easily invite outsiders. Video and screenshare would be great but I don't currently know a channel-based solution except for Discord that supports that. We could use Discord instead for this purpose but I think in this community that's generally frowned upon and so I didn't even bring that up. Other voice-only solutions that I know of that are channel-based are Ventrilo and Teamspeak but I don't think they are good contenders either as they have no advantages over Mumble. I don't particularly like Mumble but I do thinks it's the best we have in the FOSS space. I looked into the Matrix-based solutions and as far as I can tell, it's not what we're looking for either. There is element-call [0][1] which is explicit calling (and looks somewhat early in development) and then there is Jitsi integration in Element [2] but it seems to share the normal limitations of Jitsi such as no push-to-talk and no configurable silence threshold on top of not _really_ being a voice channel (in the sense of Discord or Mumble). There is Revolt [3] which is an AGPL Discord clone but when I looked at it in the past, it was somewhat complex to operate and I thought the development was a bit sketchy. I'm not sure I'd want to operate this under the Arch umbrella. With those arguments and other solutions on the table, I would like to reaffirm my suggestion to run an Arch Linux Mumble server. Cheers, Sven [0] https://github.com/element-hq/element-call [1] https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/ [2] https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/blob/develop/docs/jitsi.md [3] https://github.com/revoltchat/ <OpenPGP_signature.asc>
While I see the appeal for do-it-all software like Jitsi or Matrix, screen sharing is something that is easily outperformed by dedicated tools. We could deploy a streaming server like OvenMediaEngine [0] and users could share their webcam/screen using OBS or their browser of choice. In my experience no other do-it-all solution will ever provide the same quality and latency (sub-second). They offer a demo [1]. We could add a Keycloak SSO layer. [0] https://airensoft.com/ome [1] https://space.ovenplayer.com/
On 25/10/2024 10:41, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:
Mumble lacks video which can be really nice as one can share their screen or actually visually see someone talking.
-- hashworks Web https://hashworks.net Public Key 0x4FE7F4FEAC8EBE67
participants (5)
-
Aleksandr Razdolski
-
David Runge
-
Jelle van der Waa
-
Justin Kromlinger
-
Sven-Hendrik Haase