Freenode is dead -- Long live Libera.Chat!

Freenode is dead. That’s the unfortunate truth. On May 19, an event regularly described as “hostile takeover”, in which the control over the biggest IRC network for free, open-source software has been forcefully taken away from the volunteer group called Freenode Staff who have run it ever since it was founded about 20 years ago, has taken place.

Therefore, all the communities I am involved in and/or manage on Freenode are moving or have already moved to the new network which most of the former Freenode staff have founded: Libera.Chat. This includes:

I do not have time to provide a nice summary on the topic as I have previously, e.g., for the youtube-dl incident. In the past days, I have analyzed the available resources (i.e., blog posts, pasted chat logs, and other publicly available information from both sides), and I support the former Freenode Staff in this matter. Large parts of their claims can be verified, something I cannot say about claims from the “new management”. The way this “new management” has literally grabbed power and then started to defame the old staff clearly shows that they don’t have the best intentions, not for the users, not for Freenode as a project, not for IRC.

I have curated some links to interesting resources such as summaries, news, blog posts, resignation letters etc., so read on if you want to take a look yourself.

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AppImageLauncher: 1000 stars on GitHub

This week, AppImageLauncher’s “stargazer” count exceeded the 1000 mark. To me, this shows how many people appreciate a tool designed for the average Linux desktop user, providing a simple and intuitive workflow to manage AppImages.

By the way, did you know you can help translate AppImageLauncher? Please refer to GitHub for more information.

Big milestone: AppImageLauncher 1.0.0 released

After more than half a year, the first stable version of AppImageLauncher has been released. This marks a big milestone in the software’s history, as up to now, a continuous release scheme was used without any kind of real version scheme.

Within the last weeks, a lot has changed about AppImageLauncher. Read on to see what’s new, and find out how to install it!

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