if the featureset is not clear enough at first glance
My experience as someone who has barely dabbled in Matrix, tried comparing clients, and knows a lot of people who stick to Discord: a lot of Discord users heavily use custom emotes, voice chat, and screen sharing. It’s not even easy to figure out which Matrix clients support each of those features without installing everything and trying it out. There’s a clients comparison on matrix.org that mentions Voip but not stickers or video.
For stickers alone:
- Element is widely considered the go-to Matrix client but uses a strange integration system for predefined sticker packs instead of the MSC2545 stickers that more closely resemble what users coming from Discord would want.
- Cinny seems to have the best support for stickers/emotes but its site doesn’t mention them at all. It supports uploading and managing sticker packs at either a channel or user level, provides a nice picker UI to send any picture from those packs as either a large “sticker” or a small inline “emoji”, and allows using them for reactions.
- FluffyChat mentions stickers on its site and has the second best sticker support, with all of those except reactions and a graphical sticker picker for inline emoji (need to type them as shortcode).
- SchildiChat, Nheko, and NeoChat have some sort of limited support for custom stickers/emoji. NeoChat is the only one of those that advertises stickers on its main site. Nheko mentions them in a GitHub readme.
Being able to freely use custom emotes without paying for a Discord Nitro subscription nor server boosts would be a great selling point but it’s not something most users would be able to figure out before signing up. The limited client support isn’t great; e.g. Fluffy is the only Android client that supports sending custom stickers but some people may dislike the chat bubbles style UI.
Not every work environment is the same.
When I first started with my current employer I was given a system with RHEL preinstalled and I replaced it with Fedora on my first day. I was told to use LUKS and given a normal OpenVPN profile but otherwise they don’t control or monitor anything about my workstation. No matter how many years or decades I stay at this company, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever touch an OS that isn’t Linux-based during work time.
Every previous job I’ve been at also had me use Linux for my primary workstation, because my field of work more or less requires it, but some have needed me to access a separate Windows system/server/VM on rare occasions.
Most of the “Is open source software safe?” section of this post seems to advocate for what’s conventionally called Security Through Obscurity, which is widely considered very ineffective at preventing exploitation and at best a minor hurdle.
There are a lot of differences between Android and iOS in terms of security, attack surface, and exploitation, but attributing that to open vs closed-source completely misunderstands the entire subject. For just two of the countless reasons: Many of the worst vulnerabilities that affect Android devices are in closed-source proprietary Qualcomm firmware. A platform being open in the sense of allowing users to install any application they want to (like Windows and Android to a limited extent) or closed off to prevent installation of unapproved software (iOS, PlayStation, Toyota cars, TiVo, etc.) is completely separate from whether that platform is open-source or not. GPLv3 has license terms that try to tie the two concepts but I chose examples that don’t use it at all. Also, iOS has public kernel source code.