On 2020-06-03 01:18:43 +0200 (+0200), Thomas Goirand wrote: [...]
1/ Zoom is the default, Jitsi is the alternative. It should have been the other way around, as now, mostly everyone will be using Zoom. Participants will find me moronic to require something else than Zoom.
So far I've been in sessions for 5 different teams, and 4 of them used our Meetpad instance instead of Zoom. There has been some struggle for rooms in the 40 participant range, but we've scaled the cluster to be able to handle many rooms at least.
2/ Zoom doesn't work for me in in Firefox of Chromium (on Debian Buster). The only thing it wants is to start the (non-free) Zoom app, which I do not want to install, for security and moral reasons.
An HTML5 client is enabled for the Zoom rooms, but there's a bit of a trick to accessing it because they'd rather you ran their proprietary binary extension or standalone client. When you first go to the meeting URL, cancel the client download pop-up. Then click the link to download the client and cancel the pop-up again. After the second download cancellation it will add a link to use the browser-based HTML5 client. Yes it's silly and I'm not a fan, but it has at least worked for me (I used Chromium, mainly because I normally use Firefox for everything else and would prefer not to pollute my FF profile with the necessary microphone access permissions and so on).
We're doing free software, can't we forbid using non-free as well here? This is very disappointing. [...]
Software freedom is, in many ways, like actual freedom. We encourage people to use free/libre open source tools, but we can't realistically forbid any teams from using whatever tools they prefer, that would only encourage them to do so secretly.
Note that we did a mini-debconf-online this week-end, and it ran ok with many participants in the same room.
I'd love to get some tips from the folks running that Jitsi-Meet instance, we've definitely been getting a fair number of complaints about ours causing participants' browsers to eat most of their processor capacity, sound cutting in and out or being completely silent and needing to reconnect, et cetera. I don't think it's been the case for a majority of participants, but it's enough that it seems to have driven some teams to choose proprietary alternatives after they gave it a try. We'd love to improve the user experience. -- Jeremy Stanley