Discord client that works on Win95*, Win98 and above | Hacker News Reader

Discord client that works on Win95*, Win98 and above

github.com

253 pointsTiberium195 comments

Just a gentle warning: try out alternative Discord clients with a non-important account first. A few years ago, I used ripcord¹ and got automatically banned by Discord - probably because I had started the original Discord client on the same computer, and this triggered some heuristics. Discord's first-level support was not willing to reinstate my account, and I had to² track down their head of security on Twitter to get my account reinstated.

¹) https://cancel.fm/ripcord/, no new releases since 2021

²) I'd not generally suggest this approach. However, since COVID we have been using Discord a lot for informal communication with our students. Losing access to a dozen course servers mid-semester was a huge problem for me.

The same thing happened to me with Telegram years ago, when I logged into my account using the Haiku port of Telegram's desktop client.

Telegram allows third-party clients however

What incentive do they have to control the client? Does discord have ads?

No third party ads like you might be thinking, but a lot of in-app upsells for discord nitro (their pro tier), server boosts, custom emotes and stuff like that. Their monetization scheme is very twitch-like, I’d not be surprised if they don’t like you using third party clients that don’t shove all of that in your face.

And yet Twitch seems to allow BTT, which adds custom emotes and such that a user would normally need to pay for.

I haven't seen any streamers who officially put their sub emotes on BTTV/FFZ/7TV and enable them in their channel, so if anything they end up supplementing the sub emotes rather than providing a reason to avoid subscribing.

Twitch could increase sub emote limits, but I'm not sure they would want to. Many emotes on FFZ et al are memes used in hundreds of channels and could not be used on Twitch even if copyright was not a concern due to violating many of the other sub emote guidelines:

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/emote-guidelines?language=e...

So Twitch has no real reason to try and compete on this front. They just don't officially support it, which means anyone using the official Twitch app or not using any browser extensions will only see them as weird text in the chat. If Twitch updates the layout and breaks the extensions, the extensions will adapt, so power users get a ton of extra features at no cost to Twitch.

While these services make money riding Twitch's coattails, anyone willing to pay for the premium tiers of these services is likely either a streamer who wants to load up more meme emotes for their chat to use (increases engagement) or is the kind of power user who subscribes to multiple streamers at tier 2 or 3, so I doubt they hurt Twitch's bottom line. If anything, going to war with these extensions would likely hurt their bottom line since features like FFZ's audio compressor make many streamers' terrible audio settings listenable.

Their official client also collects a disturbing amount of telemetry that they'll miss out on.

Reminds me of the time a friend on Discord mentioned a very specific brand of ramen I didnt google, only to see an ad for this very niche brand of ramen on Facebook when I opened Facebook two minutes later. I use Facebook and Instagram drastically less every time this happens. Cant make a cent off me if I am not on your platform.

Mostly to combat bots as far as I am aware, and it can be hard to programmatically tell the difference between a malicious bot and a normal user using a 3rd party client.

With all that AI and machine learning out here I was lead to believe that this is largely trivial now.

Yes, Discord has ads.

"Click this button to activate double XP in CoD" sort of thing

They're fairly minimal and unobtrusive (and may even be opt-out), but also implemented with some minorly annoying dark patterns like being animated into existence in the middle of the toolbar. (I fairly commonly end up accepting "quests" when trying to change audio settings.)

They also push Nitro the same way.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/25516720403223...

Yep. Discord is not a chat protocol. It is a proprietary corporate service. The reason you can't use alternative clients for their service is (the TOS and...) that the client spies on you and that data is (part of) your payment.

They send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" and then recently "/science" (but it's still a POST with no response).

Also their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. On launch the desktop client opens websocket server for command and control listening.

They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).

I'm always saddened when I see an open source project's page say something like "Join us on Discord!"

I can understand an open source project being on GitHub, since, at one point, they were a pretty warm-fuzzy place, and so attracted a lot of open source projects, before they sold out to Microsoft.

But I really don't know how so many open source projects looked at Discord, early on, and thought that's a good idea.

AFAICT, Discord is pretty antithetical to open source and, especially, libre software.

Because there isn't a good replacement in open source software. Matrix and others are pretty normie hostile.

I help run a few Discord servers and due to financials, I'm always worried about extremely hostile actions by them to make money.

My list of things good open source replacement would have:

Decentralized chat servers with history

Run a optional centralized login service so users have one login

Optional centralized service knows what servers the user is a member of so any client they login to will automatically know which servers they are member of.

Centralized Mobile Notification service

Federation is absolutely not a requirement or a way around this.

> others are pretty normie hostile

This is a fairly reasonable generalisation to make about the vast majority of open-source software. 'Normie-hostile'.

i've semi-successfully moved a university linux users group onto matrix fwiw, with most people (regular discord users) happy using element's desktop/mobile UI.

it's as close to a discord-y experience as you're likely to get.

University Linux User Group I would say is already not normies.

When I say normie, they are not posting on Hacker News and never heard of Y Combinator ;) They are your non tech friends and a lot of open source needs to interact with them where they are. Where they are is Discord.

> Because there isn't a good replacement in open source software

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/9.4/LICENSE (Apache 2) and if you mean "good [hosted] replacement" https://zulip.com/for/open-source/

It, of course, does not speak to your decentralized wishlist but I'm sure they'd welcome an issue describing your goals

I really want to use zulip but last I checked they charged for push notifications. Without it, my group lost interest in using it due to missed messages.

I saw a post about webpush a day ago. Not sure if anything has changed for zulip in that area.

If you are using Zulip for an open-source project or a community, you are likely eligible for our free Community plan, which includes push notifications. https://zulip.com/help/self-hosted-billing#free-community-pl...

We charge businesses for our push notifications service because we need folks using our 100% open-source product to run their business to help pay the cost of developing it.

Things become less normie hostile as more people adopt it. Two decades ago reddit was normie hostile.

Reddit was never normie hostile. It may have not been mainstream but hostile to your average user, no. You logged in with a browser like Facebook, you could subscribe or not to any subreddit you wish, those subscriptions would show up on any browser/mobile app you logged in on, everything was stored for you server side. Centralization is what most normal people expect. They don't want to futz around with remember things or having to setup the clients every time they switch. They want it all there every time on every device.

> Matrix and others are pretty normie hostile.

Judging by the design choices I've seen in Matrix 2.0 beta clients, this seems to be changing. A few important fixes and a lot of UI simplification are falling into place. I would not be surprised if I could get my family members using it once these are all integrated in fully functional clients. Here's hoping.

I agree with you in principle but in practice there aren’t really any good options.

You either have something relatively niche that’s open but people are unlikely to have installed and is often non-trivial for project maintainers to set up and maintain. Or you have something that solves those concerns but is proprietary and sometimes even actively hostile to 3rd parties.

It feels like the whole messaging ecosystem has taken several steps backwards over the last 20 years.

I'll point out that everything is relatively niche until it becomes popular, and then it's "well, what else would you use?!" and that's how Discord even became a thing that anyone would mention. Or this weird thing named Slack - pfft, who would use a chat named that

Sure. But it’s not a project maintainers job to make an unrelated communications tool popular.

Plus there’s also the problem of finite time and proprietary tools just being more convenient.

Freedom. Convenience. Is there a tension between those?

WebChat + IRC server works just fine, only requires a browser for somebody to drive-by use, and allows more serious/heavy users to use whatever client they want. Install a logging package on the IRC server to make logs available publicly and searchable (or you can just have a bot user that does this if you're using an IRC server that someone else is hosting).

This was the norm in the late-90s through about 2010 and then suddenly it wasn't good enough.

I’m old enough to have not only used IRC in the 90s but to have also written my own IRC client.

The problem with IRC is exactly what you described yourself. You “just” need to install a half dozen things to get a modern experience and it’s not something that either the project maintainers nor casual uses of your project are going to want to do.

I loved IRC for a decade or so and even I can’t bring myself to officially support it on my open source projects. It’s just a distraction — time that could be better spent actually writing code or supporting users and other contributors.

I don’t support Discord either, but I get why other maintainers might like the zero-effort solution. It enables them to focus on the project and not building auxiliary services.

This is the problem that people miss when they talk about “just use x”… they forget that being a project maintainer is a massive time sink and time is finite. So we sometimes have to make trade offs. If it’s a choice between configuring IRC or that highly requested new feature, then few maintainers are going to pick IRC.

Oh definitely, and if I implied otherwise I did not mean to.

I stopped developing open source software because I got tired of dealing with getting people in my email demanding things from me despite it just being a personal project to scratch an itch, so I understand that a developer may not have the time to set up infrastructure to offer a modern experience over IRC. If that's the case a project is in then I agree - actually developing the project is more important.

It's more of a lament that things aren't the way that they were, not a demand that everybody cater to my preferences.

I'm part of an open source project with a self-hosted Discourse forum. It's just better in every aspect. (Discourse even has built-in DMs and chat.) I find it incredibly sad that people generally have moved away from open forums to proprietory silos like Discord or FB groups.

> that the client spies on you and that data is (part of) your payment.

What value do you think this click tracking data has? I'm genuinely curious. To me this seems like Product Manager Telemetry, which is still an insidious and pervasive privacy problem (see: Microsoft Windows), but I can't quite understand how this is a You Are the Product situation. What purchaser is going want to buy data about where people are clicking on the Discord client? What value does this provide them?

> Also their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers.

A full-fledged desktop app could also load code from a server and execute it. Or just install an "automatic update." If you're worried about this kind of thing you should be sandboxing every application that can access the Internet.

It doesn't matter how much value it has. If you pay in dollars, and suddenly the dollar is deflated to way less value than the euro, you have still payed.

Normal applications do not completely replace themselves every time they are run. I hope you can see the difference. It's easy to see that the files in an actual application running on your OS don't change. It's much harder when there are no files and everything is downloaded anew every time you start the application.

Totally different than "automatic updates" of actual applications.

> the client spies on you and that data is (part of) your payment.

>> What value do you think this click tracking data has?

That it is collected at all shows that, at least to data miners, a user's data has a value greater than the cost of collecting it.

No, the data is collected for internal use by product managers. It has little value I'm aware of on the open market and is unlikely to be collected for sale. That's my entire point. Enshittification is Bad, yes, but it's also had an even more caustic knock-on effect where a certain subset of people assume every part of every piece of software is part of a gigantic conspiracy against them, and in turn become extremely non-curious about figuring out why and how things work the way they do.

Thanks for that! Wasn't aware of the aggresive tracking nor their remote admin capability. This screams to be containerized at all costs. I will try to reduce its use to the bare minimum and only from the browser as I've been doing so far and will ever install their client.

Stop voluntarily communicating through platforms that so easily ban you.

so virtually every platform on the entire internet?

Yes. Centralized platforms and people unwilling to act against the aggregation effect are drivers of the market capture that make these antiuser activities normal.

I hear you, but the people I want to communicate with refuse to use platforms that don't so easily ban you.

In this case, it was not my choice. I preferred other tools but network effects resulted in Discord becoming our group's primary mode of real-time communication for online courses and within the group.

Let me go tell all my friends that. Why'd you waste your digital breath on such an inane comment?

I used to love Ripcord, but I wish the developer would take the FastSpring payment button off their site. I paid back in 2020 or so because it was fantastic back then, and I had hope development would continue. The Slack implementation is completely broken now, and the Discord implementation got so buggy, I finally made the switch to using the official Discord client in my browser instead.

It surprises me that they copied the suboptimal tablet-like UI layout of the official client. It's gotta be an MDI app with each chat in a separate window :)

My suggestion would have been a tab for each chat, but you're right, should be a separate window, to allow tabbing between them.

Tabbed chat windows are a newer invention than the 90s. Late-00s messaging apps all had the same, rather convenient, arrangement: a tall window with the contact/conversation list, and a tabbed window with your current conversations. Things like profiles and settings would also open in separate windows. But yeah that's my ideal desktop chat app UI tbh. It's a shame that out of the current ones, only Steam and Battle.net are like that, and those aren't even messaging apps, they're game launchers with social functionality as an extra.

I don't remember Pirch or mIRC being like that.

Even AIM used separate windows for each chat in the 90s.

mIRC doesn't exact do that, the contact list is attached to the chat/channel window. Each window sort of exists inside the main window, but can be minimized to something that mimic a tab.

What do you find "suboptimal" and "tablet-like" about it?

The fact that it doesn't take advantage of the multi-window nature of desktop systems. Everything happens in one single large window — like on an iPad.

In particular, my issue with modern IM app UIs is that the chat switcher is merged with the chat list. You can't have multiple chats that you're currently active in open at once and switch quickly between them. If you switch away from a chat, you have to find it again in the list to return to it, possibly requiring a lot of scrolling and multiple clicks for what could've been one click or even a keyboard shortcut.

Ctrl + K on the official app lets you switch quickly between the last active channels.

Ctrl + / lets you see all the short cuts.

>The fact that it doesn't take advantage of the multi-window nature of desktop systems.

That's because nobody uses more than one window. Remember, Discord was for gamers, not the tech zealot with a taskbar full of windows. Speaking from experience, I've had extremely low success trying to get normal people to understand windows. So a one-window-contains-all design is great for normal people. This design is also shared by Skype, LINE, and other mainstream chat software. Modern email clients also follow this design paradigm.

And if you still doubt me, remember: The two most popular operating systems in the world, iOS and Android, do not have windows.

Windows are a failed analogy as files-and-folders, normal people do not understand them and software for normal people rightfully don't use them.

> Windows are a failed analogy as files-and-folders, normal people do not understand them and software for normal people rightfully don't use them

Weird claim regarding files and folders. In my experience, my pretty tech illiterate relatives have a pretty strong grasp for them. Younger people do not, because they only use mobile computers that don't make frequent use of that abstraction.

Why are they a failed analogy? What are normal people doing instead of using them?

>What are normal people doing instead of using them?

They do things very simply.

Most people can not multi task, which means they only ever work with one window at a time. They get immediately confused with multiple windows. Likewise files and folders, most people can't grasp what they can't physically see so the very concept of files and folders inside a computer is pig latin and they just dump everything on their desktop which they can physically see.

A lot of tech nerd sensibilities are based upon very specific assumptions that just don't apply to most people, normal people. Anyone who wants to say anything about human interface design needs to first go out into the real world and see how real, normal people actually use computers.

Do you really think others are "just" not "go[ing] out into the real world and see how real, normal people actually use computer"?

I think we can afford to admit that this is a bit reductive and misrepresentative of the efforts required.

Considering how out of touch techies generally are, I don't think it's an unreasonable stereotype/argument to make.

It's easy to see here too, not the least the infamous DropBox comment.

> Likewise files and folders, most people can't grasp what they can't physically see so the very concept of files and folders inside a computer is pig latin and they just dump everything on their desktop which they can physically see.

What do they dump on their desktop? Surely it is files and folders!

> And if you still doubt me, remember: The two most popular operating systems in the world, iOS and Android, do not have windows.

You have to keep mobile and desktop OSes separate. Mobile OSes are for use on-the-go and mainly focus on content consumption and getting most out of a pocketable touchscreen. Desktop OSes, in contrast, are for productivity. People understand browser tabs, how would a tabbed chat window be so fundamentally different?

> Modern email clients also follow this design paradigm.

Email clients are different. You don't usually jump between messages/threads back and forth like you do all the time in IM clients when you're actively chatting in several conversations at once. You open them one by one, read them, and go do something else after no unread emails are left.

> You open them one by one, read them, and go do something else after no unread emails are left.

On the contrary, I often have multiple emails open at once, since it's pretty common for me to need to reference information from other emails in the one I'm currently writing - usually to reference past conversations or lookup addresses that didn't make it into my contacts.

>People understand browser tabs

My anecdata suggests they don't. I have tried teaching normal people how tabs work, but I might as well be speaking pig latin.

They don't on phones because there they are hidden away and you have to know about them. I've seen relatives' phones with hundreds of tabs open simply because they had no idea mobile browsers do that by default.

But on desktop, tabs are plainly visible all the time and it's very easy to discover how they work.

Is there a pinworm outbreak in your neck of the woods? All of these concepts (MDI / Tabs) easily fly with anyone we deal with on a daily basis.

All I can tell you is that when normal people don't understand windows, you definitely are not going to get them to understand windows in windows (which is what tabs effectively are).

I hate all these simplified designs we see in computers now just like most of the other weird people here, but those designs are not for a lack of good reasons.

Skype and every desktop email client I've ever used both let you open per-chat/per-email windows, even if it's not the default.

I’m still sad that Gajim (XMPP client) switched to this horrible design from their old one. There’s now no XMPP/Jabber client left on Windows that’s not optimized for MUC, only some like PSI/Miranda that lack support for some important XEPs.

Exception: Telegram Desktop, which has “Open in new window” in each chat’s context menu.

Too much white space.

Enabling "compact mode" in the settings helps a lot with that. My discord client looks a lot like my IRC client.

I agree. All they had to do was to copy mIRC!

I still don't get why so many channels that should probably be on IRC moved to Discord. Yesterday I tried to share the output of an strace and apparently I have to pay to emit more than 2000 characters. Login to Discord is something that shocks me: every single time I'm told that I'm logging in from a new computer (wrong). Confim I'm human. Then need to check my email. Confirm. And relogin. This at least to me happens every single time. Reported to Discord obviously in vain. Never experienced such a login disaster in my life.

What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord? Since I have started to use Discord couldn't find a single good thing about it.

This feels like a generational thing, tbqh.

One of the reasons people trumpet for moving to Discord is "it keeps the message history!!!!!!!" which would be nice if 1) Discord's search wasn't a wet bag of cat ass, 2) if anybody _bothered_ to search for their question first (tale as old as time / song as old as rhyme / RTFM n00b), and 3) their platform wasn't moderated by and largely used of groomers.

It's not like you can't log IRC channel chat and make it available for search and BONUS, assuming Google doesn't replace everything with AI, it's easily discoverable through Google or other search engines once they get crawled.

> What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to...

Why did forums emerge ... like HN or Reddit.

Lots of technologies/platforms accomplish the same end goal. It's more about where have people gathered (network effects) and valuable information shared.

(Not many people are on IRC these days, and as a result - less valuable information can be found there)

I do regret the jump from desktop computing to mobile, but mIRC for example didn't jump while Discord, Meta, and the other advertiser-pleasers went in mobile-first.

mIRC for instance: Linux - use Wine

MacOS - run mIRC inside a Windows emulator, with no plans to change that, although it is compatible with other Mac-ready IRC clients that you can use to talk to the same people

Similar situation for Android and iOS compatibility

Source: https://www.mirc.com/mac.html

Wine? on Linux? Seriously, any IRC chat client on that OS would stomp MIRC any day.

> every single time I'm told that I'm logging in from a new computer (wrong)

You're probably doing a lot of things to protect your privacy, things which prevent Discord from recognizing you're logging in from the same machine. Logging in from a browser? Wiping all the cookies and storage every time? Surprised it doesn't recognize you?

2000 characters seems like it should be on a pastebin, not pasted into an IRC channel. I've shared pastebin links in a discord channel, one shared with matrix. For reference, that content length is three times the OP comment.

> What is wrong with IRC

The UX sucks (even if there are a thousand UX's and some of them don't suck, they get drowned out by the sucky ones) and the friction is too high to get started.

> and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord?

They did UX right and lowered the friction. I doubt Discord actually poached users from IRC, they just made chatting great again.

IRC is terrible the same way it was terrible when I used it 30 years ago.

It's Y2K brah if you can't paste an image into chat, your chat is garbage.

Chat is more than text, unless you go to meet your friend for coffee and you chat by typing out words on a typewriter and handing sheets of paper back and forth between each other.

And that's like one of the ten thousand problems with IRC.

"But it's lightweig..." so few people care about how lightweight it is that the statement "nobody cares how lightweight it is" is only off the mark by a millimeter or two.

Two more problems are: the ratio of dickheads-to-humans and security flaws so bad that any organization releasing a spec that bad today would be pilloried as either incompetent or actually literally malicious every day, by everyone, all of the time, on hacker news.

ps: the limit for IRC is 512 characters. If you try to paste an strace into an IRC chat if your client and server are good it will be broken up into multiple messages, if they are bad the message will be discarded, and regardless of if your message makes it from your client to everyone else, you will probably be autobanned for flooding.

Just use Jabber. IRC is not IM. Enuff said. Discord it's a cancer.

>What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord?

You're looking at it from the perspective of a chat Participant instead of an Owner/Administrator.

For the owners+admins, the other alternatives of IRC, email mailing lists, forum software like vBulletin, phpBB, etc require extra work of provisioning a server and maintaining it.

From the perspective of the chat topic owner, Discord is the simpler than any of the above. Just click "Add A Server (+)" and start sending out invites in seconds. (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-...)

In other words, the tradeoff is it's more hassle for some participants (like you) but it's less hassle for the topic administrator.

Another feature that's important to some Administrators that's not easily available on a self-hosted IRC server is blocking bots or lower-quality participants via Discord's "Verification Level": https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/216679607-Veri...

Turning that knob will also annoy some potential participants.

EDIT ADD a link to help illustrate the reply about "RBAC" implemented in Discord: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/214836687-Disc...

Discord also has implemented an RBAC system that makes permissioning simple.

Yes, but if that's going to alienate me, I'm not going to join that Discord server.

Note: I just deleted Discord from my computer.

>, but if that's going to alienate me, I'm not going to join that Discord server.

Of course! Your preference is understandable but it just means the owner/admin can't make everybody happy. Your rejection of Discord because the admin chose it must be weighed against the following factors:

(1) you also can't join an IRC chat that doesn't exist because the owner/admin has no interest in the extra work of setting up an IRC node. E.g. the open source code project maintainer has no interest (or wants to spend money) on provisioning a server to run IRC software. The money problem & hosting provisioning problem is solved by the owner/admin just using Discord.

(2) there are other users that prefer Discord because they already have the login for other purposes (gaming, art, etc). Millions of users already have the Discord app on their phone. No need for users to hunt down an IRC client. The owner/admin doesn't want to alienate them.

So to make users like ivanmontillam more happy, it requires making the owner/admin and the other users less happy because they don't want to use IRC. That's the tradeoff.

> You might be able to use Mingw-w64, but you might run into trouble running the final product on anything newer than XP

I rarely see a maximum system requirement.

It was quite common on Linux before docker

Not exactly the problem docker solves…

Welcome to the brave new world where modern OSes only get worse

There are old games which tied system state directly to computational power. A buddy recently tried to boot up some childhood relic (Descent 1?) and said pressing forward made you move at light speed and immediately crash into a wall. So, there is software with implicit maximums.

This is why dosbox sets the virtual cpu clock.

Very common in old software.

* from the recent commit "V1.07 works on Win95. But you have to install a different LibCrypto, LibSSL, and also install the WinSock2 update."

Download for the Win95 version: https://github.com/DiscordMessenger/dm/releases/tag/v1.07a

According to the author's bluesky posts, there's a few features missing from Win32s compared to regular Win32 that prevent this from being ported even further back to windows 3.1 easily.

"General limitations under Win32s (131896)", surviving technical note.

https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.microsoft.com/MISC/KB/...

This is screaming for a Raymond Chen post explaining the strange-but-true history behind it.

The first item on the list is pretty glaring: "Thread creation is not supported."

This would be a show-stopper for a lot of things.

The ‘s’ does stand for ‘subset’ after all :)

Minimum system requirements: 64 Mb RAM.

Hear that, official Discord?

---

Now, considering this project will be hunted down and DMCA-ed or C&D-ed soon, has the original author considered separating the generic messenger UI code from the transport code to make the codebase usable for less ... jealous ... services?

Got curious and checked. A Discord tab used ~500MBs. Other big sites (YT, FB, etc) were also at hundreds of MBs. Web bloat is real.

Actually Discord - the standalone "application" - has improved at some point.

It used to go up to multiple gigabytes (i caught it at over 4 at some point) if you left the meme channel displayed for weeks. I'm guessing it used to keep all those animated gifs uncompressed in memory.

I does seem more reasonable now. For a javascript "application" at least.

> displayed for weeks

I'm guessing that since Discord is a gamer oriented application all their devs are used to restarting their Windows PCs daily and don't realize that you can leave other operating systems running for months* without any trouble.

* or years if you don't apply core os updates.

libpurple plugin would be amazing

Time to stuff this into BoxedWine (https://www.boxedwine.org/) and we'll finally have a fast, lightweight chat client for Discord!

As I get older (and watch my parents get much older) I see a desire for a completely stable computer system that continues to work exactly the same way for timescales of decades. Currently this is impossible in the Windows or Mac ecosystems -- the operating system will go out of support, and force an upgrade, and then things will work differently. And maybe the upgrade requires new hardware, and then there is no way to bring your old programs across and hard to bring all your data across and then everything is different. Maybe its possible in the linux ecosystem, though there sure are a lot of people saying you have to stay on the update treadmill or else you'll get eaten by the script kiddies and their internet worms.

Maybe there is an approach using something like BoxedWine, to have a stable user-facing system that can be 100% ported to new hardware or underlying OS?

As I get older, I accept that nothing humans make can last without maintenance, and that for computer systems in our growth economy, that maintenance has to be equivalent to change.

It sucks, but the repeated aggravation of broken expectations is worse.

the operating system will go out of support

That doesn't mean it stops working, and I know there are plenty of communities providing unofficial support for old Windows and even DOS. The situation with Mac may be similar but smaller, just due to relative popularity.

While this is mostly true, with how much software is web based, and how web browser support is essentially only on supported OSes, OS support does matter.

This is less of an issue for DOS and Windows 95/98 because software in that era was offline-first.

Not possible.

The most important thing you will need is to access digital banking and government services. These apps already requires you to have an updated and locked-down system.

If you disregard that requirement (let's say you'll replace a tablet periodically, just for banking and government services), the next important thing you will need is communication. That means an updated browser that can open the future generic wordpress-based website, discord, twitter or whatever platforms will be popular when you'll be old. These platforms already require an updated browser, and updated browsers require updated OS, which require updated hardware too.

You don't actually need a "completely stable computer system". What you need is a secretary.

It's entirely possible - just stop redesigning your UI every 3 years to justify someones paycheck.

No-one cares if the underlying architecture changes, so long as the user facing experience remains stable.

At no point in history has everyone "just", and they're not going to start now.

I'm replying to my own post with new info.

Actually, there's another way to do it. It's what I am doing, I just didn't realise it until now. :)

Reserve a room in your house for your own computer history museum. Use old systems, running old software, doing old tasks that you learned years ago. Never update, never upgrade. Each time you need something new and it doesn't work anymore on the systems that you have, buy another new system and add it to your collection. Keep using it for that task and newer, while continuing to use the old systems for the old tasks. Virtual machines work too.

I have been running the same Debian stable install (disk transplanted or cloned from the previous machine) since 2004

The trick is to put an interface computer between the (user) computer and the internet.

The user computer remains unchanged through the decades. The interface computer is updated with all the security updates, and communicates requests back and forth between the user computer and the internet, ensuring format compliance. It also contains software to convert file formats from newer version to the user computer compatible versions (where possible). For example, converting Word document format to some old version.

Just beautiful. 64Mb of RAM and snappy due to native UI framework use. Compare it to the sluggish 1.2Gb of RAM that Teams uses (when not in a video call).

Even 64MB is a lot of RAM for a typical Windows 9x machine.

Still good progress, though.

every Proton based app tends to use min. 1GB of RAM. That's scary

*Electron, you almost got it :)

Oh, just a sign difference, stop being so exact ;)

MSN messenger would fit in well under 2MB back in the day. As we go up, we go down.

Someone needs to get around to doing this for Microsoft Teams.

You'd need to somehow get it to work on Windows 10/11 first.

I'm not sure one person has that much self loathing.

That's a morally questionable action—it might encourage some businesses to stay on Windows 98 even longer. And if that weren't bad enough already, the employees would also have to use Teams!

Joke's on you, I think nowadays it's more enjoyable to use windows 98/95 compared to 10/11.

You may have to forego an always connected workflow but i guess that's good for your mental health too :)

Back then they had the technology to build a solitaire program without advertising, now sadly lost to the mists of time.

Lol wtf. I just ran Solitaire (on Win10) for the first time. I was greeted by a several second loading screen, a prompt telling me to login to something or another so I can "Level Up" and gain XP rewards, then an error message because it failed to login to XBox Live that cycled through multiple times as I cancelled out, before finally allowing me the privilege of playing as a guest on my own computer. And then I get a splash page filled with advertising crap of other products, which then gives me more errors when I tried to 'x' out of it.

What an ungodly abomination that is an utterly appropriate living metaphor for what "modern" OSs have turned into. I can't wait until everything also has "AI" shoved into it. It'll be great.

Watch ads as AI plays solitaire for you, now only $1.99.

Software has never been easier to make, there have never been more software developers, yet we are stuck with software monopoly

That version of Microsoft Solitaire Collection released ~12.5 years ago.

Win 7 felt like that sweet balance between modernity and functionality, especially before Microsoft started backporting the "telemetry" and other "features" from Win10 to Win7. Everything since then seems to serve little purpose other than revenue generation driven solely by forced obsolescence.

If Microsoft had just kept iterating on Windows 2000 forever and never developed past XP/Vista/7/etc. I probably wouldn't be a Linux user today.

How is this any more morally questionable than forcing employees to upgrade to Windows 11?

I've been thinking of doing a native Skype client for years. I resented Skype 8 onwards.

Skype 7.x was the last Delphi Skype.

The last great one, before this abominable slow client that led to the exode from Skype.

Incidentally, Delphi itself jumped the shark at version 8.

Somewhat unrelated, but it's crazy to see how durable Windows APIs are. I, for unrelated reasons, last month, opened Guitar Pro 4, which had been laying around in my warez folder (copied many tines accross hard drives) since I pirated it circa 2004 as a teenager, and it worked perfectly in my machine running windows 11. Even though I love Linux, that doesn't happen over there, right?

Definitely not. I have a few legitimately purchased Linux releases from GOG that fail to launch on a modern distribution. Have to use the Windows build plus Wine.

You can actually take some Windows 1.0/2.0 programs, run them on 32-bit Windows 11 and they work! The code structure of Win32 programs is still quite similar to the 16-bit era apart from removing archaisms like the Pascal call convention and far pointers. And when you move to the 98/2000 era, the APIs have really changed very little to this day.

Open protocols are eternal. Proprietary garbage lasts as long as the company does.

Maybe it's just my laptops (MacBook Air and Pro). But every time I open it, it's always "updating" (plugins?) before I can use it. Opening it in the browser is much faster.

One of the advantages of running programs like this in the browser is that you download a fresh (with caching) version every time you reload the page.

Desktop apps are in the best place to silently download and install updates. This can be with a schedule via OS, or some background service that is always running even if the main application isn't.

This has worked very well for Chrome for a very long time, the only time it doesn't is for people like me that restart the computer only every couple of weeks.

Discord could have a similar model but choose not to for some reason.

Rebooting is not necessary unless you have updated the kernel.

Microsoft has generated billions of hours of bullshit labor pretending otherwise.

If you only open it every few days / weeks it will download the latest version, as they push regularly.

If you open it every day and still get updates there might be something wrong.

Of course there's something wrong: you're using Discord :)

Looks like the security/integrity of SSL isn't taken too seriously as the build recommends to use a hex editor to replace "_strtoi64" and "_strtoui64" with "functions likely to return 0 such as iswxdigit" in order to successfully link OpenSSL on windows 2000 and earlier. Unclear what impact such a hack would have on the integrity of the crypto operations performed by OpenSSL?

It's unlikely people running applications on an operating system that stopped publishing updates over 20 years ago care very much about that.

Cool, but Bitlbee can proxy any IRC client (even for DOS and Windows) against some server and use your accounts (even Mastodon) over IRC.

https://bitlbee.org

I used to love cordless. I could be on an old Sparc machine or even DOS on a 486 and access Discord.

Unfortunately the only thing alternative clients for are good for now is getting banned.

If you use [1] you can run it on Windows 3.1.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959775

That's a fun project. But I wonder: is it a good idea to connect to the internet from these old systems?

That's the beauty about fun projects. They don't have to be good ideas.

Absolutely not.. It is fun to watch what happens though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssTIx0qm2to

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the conclusion from that video seems to be that it's OK to connect Win98 to the internet in 2024, as nothing really happened?

I expected the installation to be infected very quickly, but seems it just got a bunch of port scans and not much more than that.

I was expecting it to be worse to be honest, but thinking rationally about it, how many people would be targeting win9x these days ?

Security by 'obsolete' !

For awhile mirai botnet was able to infect anything using upnp and a default credential within 20 minutes of it being connected.

These days ISPs are better about shutting that kind of thing down. They monitor for botnet activity in their networks and their modem/router gateway combo devices are a lot more robust than they were in the 00's. It is also more acceptable now than it was to ship routers with upnp turned off by default, which helps A LOT.

Unfortunately, that also tends to come with the inability to turn upnp (or any port forwarding whatsoever) back on.

For example, I'm paying double the local market rate of a 1gbit connection for ~150-300mbit connection, and I can't even change my WiFi password or SSID. That's just how everyone expects renting to be these days. It's not worth the hassle to fight it, so I just hack around with tailnet instead.

I wouldn't give it a public IP with no other firewall but plugged in at home temporarily from time to time behind a decent firewall it's probably fine unless you've already got Mirai botnet stuff happening in your home.

So many good memories when seeing such design... I wonder why things got so complicated nowadays

How long until they get slapped with a trademark claim?

Ripcord is a third party discord client that's been around for quite a while, as far as I'm aware they haven't run into any trouble. And they actually might get used as opposed to someone seriously trying to run discord on windows 95

I think the root of the problem in this one is that it's named "Discord Messenger", Ripcord is reminiscent but not confusing.

That's fair

Same for Vencord/Vesktop

Speaking as a ripcord user, it helps your unofficial client avoid being blocked when you don't update for years and fall behind on feature parity (though I personally don't miss most any of said features)

Why do you think Ripcord stopped getting updated? :)

I don't think Discord cares as long as their backend still gets to harvest all the data.

I thought they used to aggressively ban users on custom clients. They even got rid (years ago) of their API for non-bot clients. AFAIK they are currently against their terms of service.

I never really felt the need to try third party so no direct experience. I'm mostly going of how they have monetized the product. I would assume it is against EULA but I haven't seen them enforce it recently.

Why would Discord need a trademark claim - they control the backend so they can shut down third-party clients and/or ban users using them whenever they want.

It looks so snappy and efficient

I miss these kind of applications. Nowadays everything is flat tons of wasted space, unresponsive and eats 300mb ram because it runs on electron. Just compare windows 11 task manager to windows 2000 task manager.

Or Windows Control Panel vs the Settings App.

Win2000 task manager was absolute crap. I already wrote why here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549102#41576689

Cool project, but it is missing central features of Discord such as voice and screen sharing.

I mean, it is for Win95 and Win98.

What do you mean my 250mhz processor cant handle voice chat and screen sharing?

What I mean is, they are the potential limitations:

1. Modern VoIP applications are incompatible with Windows 95/98

2. Hardware availability

3. Networking issues

4. Driver support

5. Obsolete Protocols

6. Performance limitations (indeed, modern audio codecs may be an issue, incl. Opus and AAC)

A 250 MHz processor can handle basic voice chat but with significant limitations, and there is much more to it when it comes to practice... so while technically a 250 MHz processor might (for historical experimentation or nostalgia), in reality it is not practical for functional use today.

A Pentium 233MMX is capable of DVD playback, so I think voice chat is definitely possible. I've worked on VoIP phones that had slower CPUs and they handled a SIP stack just fine.

A Pentium III 733MHz with 128MB RAM running Win98 works fine for (low-res) video chat. Been there, done that.

I know, but it is still not practical or suitable for functional use. Just to help you understand what I mean: obtaining such a CPU (with the rest of the compatible hardware) and obtain & install Windows 98 is not as straightforward these days. Sure it may be for me because I still have my old hardware, but still. And by the way (for another PC) I had to install Windows 11 because I had Windows 7 and all my programs stopped supporting it. Not practical either, sadly. I was forced to install Windows 11.

Install a Linux distribution and install your software in Wine.

I do use Linux (mainly).

> A Pentium 233MMX is capable of DVD playback

No they aren't. DVD playback on early systems was hardware based using an MPEG2 decoder (often included on the sound card that came packed in with the DVD drive, or on some video cards or dedicated MPEG decoder cards)

Software playback of DVD's on a Pentium MMX at 233mhz is going to be limited to single digit framerates, especially if you are trying to decode Dolby Digital or DTS audio as well

I recall MSN Messenger supporting phone calls during the Windows 98 days. There should be no fundamental reason why it could not handle VoIP.

The audio codecs in use on Discord are exponentially more CPU-intensive than what was used on MSN back then, and there's no GPU offloading.

I doubt they are using exponential time algorithms. They appear to be using Opus, which appears to be O(NlogN) worst case. Opus is also well known to be computationally cheap, like most (all?) audio codecs. It should run fine on the Pentium II.

I would be more concerned about modern video codecs. None of them are exponential time, but they need so much compute that it is unlikely that a Pentium II could handle them.

I'm not sure if Discord has options to fall back to H.263 like the open standards world (SIP) does, but that's the classic codec from 1995 and would definitely be usable on the CPUs of the time; if that's still too slow, then there's always H.261 (1988) which is basically "motion JPEG but with interframes".

You’re right and iirc it’s what Microsoft did with their NetMeeting that worked on Windows 9x (although poorly by today’s standards).

I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean “exponentially more” in the asymptotic complexity sense. They could be both O(N log(N)), but with dramatically different constants.

We should revive Microsoft NetMeeting!

or CU-SeeMe

The modern protocols? Likely not, but it was absolutely possible back then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting

NetMeeting even used an open ITU protocol that could voice call other clients! The 90s were a different time.

It'd be interesting to see this project develop further, if only to get WebRTC running on Win95 (iirc).

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