My laptop is getting old and i can’t have Element eat up half of my RAM. There are many more clients out there but which one is good? aka "the best? ;-)
My requirements: lightweight, encryption 100% supported, active development/community. runs neatly 24/7 in the background.
Should also support the latest features, let me customize when to get notifications: priorities / muted chatrooms. And ideally also look clean and run on the Pinephone. But that’s optional.
I don’t care which desktop environment or cli.
What do you use?
Yeah. I like my home screen like Gnome’s DE; nothing on it whatsoever. I only want my 3 button navigation, clock, WiFi status and battery. Absolute fine grain control over my notifications is very important to me. I’m extremely burned out on notifications used for user attention manipulation on the google framework. I an on Graphene with no google services. I only want notifications if they can be default opt-in and primarily peer to peer for things like DM. I don’t want any visual indicator for such background services. Basically, I expect SMS like functionality; out of sight, out of mind until needed.
so turn off notifications??
Yes, for social type stuff. I’m disabled. Interruptions are very counter productive for me. If I have the strength to work on something, the last thing I need is some excuse for distraction. It will only be a short time before I will need to take a break, and will inevitably see whatever pending dot notifications I am interested in checking. Or I’ll just check them manually if I care. I don’t mind when notifications are from individuals sending direct messages. I don’t want any other form of notifications by default. I’m fine with something like a dot notification on the app only, like if there is a direct comment reply to something I posted on a general thread, but this is not a phone call, sms or equivalent type of priority to me. It is peripheral, and something that has limited import. It shouldn’t demand my attention with a sound in the real analog world, or shove itself in my face the moment I view a device. Like a student in a classroom, it should quietly raise its hand and wait for its turn if time allows.
I think the way to handle this is to long-press on that notification and turn it off. This way the notification is there in theory so your app doesn’t get killed in the background and you don’t get a notification shown either. I did that with all the persistent notifications from several apps (including Element) and my phone looks clean. But don’t disable all the notification categories. Just the persistent background one so that you’ll still get notified of messages and so on.
thing is what you want is impossible (background services with no notification). However, Android has per-app notification settings where you can toggle notification categories, so the app can request to not be killed by showing a persistent notification, and you won’t see it because you’ve hidden it