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Ubuntu Open Source

Ubuntu's Dev Discussions Will Move From IRC to Matrix (omgubuntu.co.uk) 70

Posted by EditorDavid from the changing-the-channels dept.
The blog OMG Ubuntu reports: Ubuntu's key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place... Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move — officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already.

As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu development teams with privileged access can only be actioned if requests are made on Matrix. Canonical-employed Ubuntu developers will be expected to be present on Matrix during working hours... The aim is to streamline organisation, speed up decision making, ensure key developers are reliably reachable, and avoid discussions and conversations from fragmenting across multiple platforms... It's hoped that in picking one platform as the 'chosen one' the split in where the distro's development discourse takes place can be reduced and greater transparency in how and when decisions are made restored.

IRC remains popular with many Ubuntu developers but its old-school, lo-fi nature is said to be off-putting to newer contributors. They're used to richer real-time chat platforms with more features (like discussion history, search, offline messaging, etc). It's felt this is why many newer developers employed by Canonical prefer to discuss and message through the company's internal Mattermost instance — which isn't publicly accessible. Many Ubuntu teams, flavours, and community chats already take place on Matrix...
"End-users aren't directly affected, of course," they point out. But an earlier post on the same blog notes that Matrix "is increasingly ubiquitous in open-source circles. GNOME uses it, KDE embraces it, Linux Mint migrated last year, Mozilla a few years before, and it's already widely used by Ubuntu community members and developers." IRC remains unmatched in many areas but is, rightly or wrongly, viewed as an antiquated communication platform. IRC clients aren't pretty or plentiful, the syntax is obtuse, and support for 'modern' comforts like media sending, read receipts, etc., is lacking.To newer, younger contributors IRC could feel ancient or cumbersome to learn.

Though many of IRC's real and perceived shortcomings are surmountable with workarounds, clients, bots, scripts, and so on, support for those varies between channels, clients, servers, and user configurations. Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated. It lets users on different servers to communicate without friction. Plus, Matrix features encryption, message history, media support, and so, meeting modern expectations.
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Ubuntu's Dev Discussions Will Move From IRC to Matrix More

Ubuntu's Dev Discussions Will Move From IRC to Matrix

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  • Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @05:01AM (#65137845)

    What is the Matrix?

    (This is the first I've heard of it)

    • Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @05:06AM (#65137847)

      What is the Matrix?

      You need a red pill.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 )
      Do Matrix clients still use emojis for key fingerprinting? That was something I found severely off putting and stupid when I checked it out many years ago.

      • Re: Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hey00 ( 5046921 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @07:12AM (#65137929)

        So I read your sentence, and it didn't make sense. So I searched for it and what the fuck is going on?

        What kind of degenerate moron thinks that making people verify a string of 7 emojis like ðY±ðYðYðY¦SðY¼ðYðY is better than making them compare strings like 1337-4242-9001 ?

        And I bet slashdot will fall at displaying those emojis, further proving how utterly idiotic that idea is.

        Torvalds was right, sometimes you need harsh language to get your point across, because nice words can't accurately convey how moronic that kind of idea is to people who are stupid enough to devise it.

        • What kind of degenerate moron thinks that making people verify a string of 7 emojis like ðY±ðYðYðY¦SðY¼ðYðY is better than making them compare strings like 1337-4242-9001 ?

          The same kind of degenerate moron who thinks making users play hide-and-seek with stepperless razor-thin scrollbars is better than letting them use full-featured ones. Whimsy, cuteness, and a distorted fashion sense are more important to them than usability and practicality.

        • What kind of degenerate moron thinks that making people verify a string of 7 emojis like ðY±ðYðYðY¦SðY¼ðYðY is better than making them compare strings like 1337-4242-9001

          Gen Z software developers

        • Torvalds was right, sometimes you need harsh language to get your point across, because nice words can't accurately convey how moronic that kind of idea is to people who are stupid enough to devise it.

          Torvalds has backed away from that attitude.

          You can convey almost any point without resorting to cussing if you have a good command of vocabulary.

          • Torvalds is wrong for having backed away. You can convey any point without cursing, but that doesn't mean the party will receive the intent.

            There are some stupid people that simply won't understand, or will not take into account, a critic if it is polite.

            Maybe they can't read past the form, maybe they think politeness is a weakness, maybe that it's a sign you're not serious, maybe they simply are too stupid to understand your expanding, I don't know, but the fact is that some people won't back down from the

            • Torvalds is wrong for having backed away.

              Fuck you asshole no he fucking isn't I can't believe anyone could be such a drooling motherfucking moron to think such a thing.

              or...

              I disagree.

              • It doesn't work on all people, as I've said.

                When you tell a new guy on a project that you disagree how we code components here, but he then proceed to write code as he wanted completely differently from how you told him.

                Whet you then you tell him again you disagree with his approach because that's what was used before and it caused lots of duplicated code and useless complexity, and bugs and inconsistencies, but he insist his approachis better.

                When it seems he finally gets it and says he'll rework it, but i

          • Sometimes in product management you have to be stern (at a minimum) for people to get the idea that you know what you're talking about and that the other person is wrong/being impossible/ignorant/etc

    • The Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth...

    • It's a prison that you can't see or smell or touch. A prison for your mind.

    • https://matrix.org/ [matrix.org]

      https://github.com/matrix-org/... [github.com]

      Federated, Decentralized, Encrypted chat platform. It hits all the buzz words for open-source bingo. I set up a personal instance in my home lab a few days ago and its quite nice.

    • > What is the matrix?

      https://youtu.be/O5b0ZxUWNf0?t... [youtu.be]

  • ... richer real-time chat platforms with more features (like discussion history, search, offline messaging, etc).

    I will let those features know of their absence, the next time I see them (and many, many more) with one or two keystrokes in WeeChat [weechat.org] or Irssi [github.io].

    But hey, at least it's not Discord.

  • Cumbersome to learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tedturbo ( 4868731 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @06:26AM (#65137903)
    If IRC is cumbersome to learn, maybe new devs should find another job, heh..

    • Re:Cumbersome to learn? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bleedingobvious ( 6265230 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @06:37AM (#65137909)

      Suspect the underpinning issue is expecting the user to communicate in full, rational, sentences - as opposed to memes and other nonsense.

      New devs even treat eye contact or question marks as "agressive". More accurate noun for this generation would be Brokens.

      • They aren't the ones painting an entire generation under a same brush. Heck even the use of the term "Ok Boomer" has fallen out of fashion when the generation using it realised it was childish. It's a shame really since they ended up being the more adult.

  • Given they use bzr/hg instead of git and charge for fundamental security updates, nothing weird they do surprises me.

  • IRC is still a thing? (Score:3)

    by dayL8 ( 184680 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @07:10AM (#65137927)

    Am I the only one who fell asleep in the early 2000s, woke up, read this article, and was stunned that there is someone still using IRC - and a significant project no less? Do other gropus use it as well?

    • IRC is still nice if you feel paying for a VPN defeats the point of piracy but don't want to get your Internet turned off until you read a letter about how you're a dirty pirate from your isp. Allegedly. I heard... From friends.

    • I went sleep sometimes early 2010s and recently woke up too!

      IRC is declining, but seems like it's still used more (for dev Collab) than what I remember from early 2000s. Overall though seems all opensource activity is down, or then it's all web crud that my brain autoignores.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Others and I still use IRC! We also have matrix connected to it too. We use both! Matrix is useful on mobile devices because IRC is not good for disconnections and reconnections which is annoying!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        You can use openvpn to transparently hop between ips and keep you connection with the IRC server up all the time since the IP the IRC server will see doesn't change. openvpn hops between client ips transparently on mobile. It also work for everything else such as ssh.

    • Am I the only one who fell asleep in the early 2000s, woke up, read this article, and was stunned that there is someone still using IRC - and a significant project no less? Do other gropus use it as well?

      IRC is still vastly popular across the world. It's just fallen out of favor in the North America and Western Europe, where we always have to have the latest shiny thing. I miss IRC quite a bit... I used it a LOT in the late 90's... but it seems like most of the populated servers are dominated by non-English speaking channels now.

    • IRC never went away. It's simple and it works well. So much shit has moved to Discord now and you really can't make backups of channel history. There are some scripts that seem able to scrape servers and channels but you need a burner account because you'll get banned for doing it.

    • Google uses it.

  • IRC is federated (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @08:13AM (#65137969)

    Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated. It lets users on different servers to communicate without friction.

    What? Have these people not heard of IRC networks?

    IRC is the original federated real-time communications protocol.

    If they want to use something else they can do that, but they can't go claiming IRC isn't federated.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by flux ( 5274 )

      IRC iss closed federation: you need to agree with the network admins to get your server linked. In addition, the servers are manually configured to conform to a tree structure network, not free-form one.

      I believe nowadays the term federation by default means open federation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        Real federation would mean you take your content with you. Matrix copies the content to all receiving servers. It's effectively synchronizing a DAG between servers which converges after some time to the same graph on all participating servers. Even XMPP binds rooms to a hosting server and only federates the clients.

  • I interviewed with them some time ago. The process is absolutely abhorrent and off-putting. They ask you to click on capitalised vs uncapitalised letters and measure the response time like you are a captivity monkey. I don't know who moronic HR decided that was a good way of selecting candidates, but they should be fired.

  • I tried to use a support group once that had switched from irc to slack and it was horrible. You would post a question and come back the next day to see if anyone answered and your question would be just gone.. I have never heard of matrix but I hope it is alot better.

  • I used to use mIRC on windows - 20+ years ago.
    It used to have a fully useable graphical UI.
    And for everything fancy it had bots.

    So the conclusion in the summary that IRC is difficult to use, is not really true.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by laxguy ( 1179231 )

      yes. these are the same people who think file systems are confusing so they just leave everything on their desktop.

      • You can not leave anything on the desktop since decades.

        The amount of files one has is a million times more than would fit on the desktop.

        I doubt I would get more than 400 files on the desktop - and if so ... how would I find the one I am looking for?

  • Matrix can bridge with irc (Score:3)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Monday February 03, 2025 @10:28AM (#65138179)

    Matrix is open and pretty flexible. It can bridge with a whole number of chat protocols including irc, telegram, Google talk, etc. Even can bring sms into a channel. If Ubuntu wishes they could set up an irc bridge that could mirror the matrix channel to irc. Matrix is complicated but very powerful. It's not a bad choice for bringing all your disparate forms of personal communication into one place.

  • Why not connect each other? My friends and I did that the old IRCd and Matrix servers.

  • I used to run an IRC server for chatting with a few friends. We switched to Mattermost just because IRC lacks some nice features.

    The biggest thing IRC lacks is a record of the conversation. If you close your IRC client and come back a day later, you miss any messages posted in the interim, and unless you have history plugins or bots, there's no way to get them back.

    Italic and bold text, images, code formatting, etc seemed to me like frivolous things, but they're actually really nice once you're used to

    • That's why you run channel keeper bots to maintain and log everything.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dskoll ( 99328 )

        Sure, that gets you chat history with a non-standard way to store and retrieve it, but it doesn't get you all the other advantages. And with Mattermost, it's built-in.

  • Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated

    Whoever wrote that knows fuck about shit and should never be listened to again, ever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      It can be federated but it's not an automatic process. Remember when freenode shut down? Was a mess and was never federated.

  • It's better than using snail mail or two tin cans and string. [wikipedia.org]

    Yes, I'm old enough to remember using this system as a kid but unfortunately, I need AI-based voice enhancement beyond 100ft to understand my friends.

  • The topic said, "Don't ask questions Google it." I used to use IRC a lot 30 years ago. I log in once in a while now, but all of the channels have no chats going on.

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