Re: Small Open Source Digital Classroom
On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 03:57:17 +0000
"Russell L. Harris" <russell@rlharris.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 07:09:35PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> >Actually, *no* official Debian repository currently contains Jitsi. It
> >was removed in 2017, apparently due to QA issues, although I don't know
> >the whole story:
>
> Perhaps the problem was nothing more than a conflict with another
> package in the Debian distribution. Besides, that was three years
> ago. And Jitsi has a Debian package which I have installed on Debian
> 9; it is running properly.
Yes, a Debian package prepared (and maintained) by upstream. My point
was that it isn't in *Debian's* repositories (even three years later).
> >I spent some time today trying to find a libre alternative to Zoom,
> >preferably one in the Debian repos, but came up empty. The closest I
> >found were indeed Jitsi Meet (a part of the much larger Jitsi
> >project)...
>
> It appears to me that Jitsi has something for everyone. With nothing
> more than a headset and a camera (camera optional) you can conference
> via WebRTC on Jitsi. Are you concerned about bandwith? Log in
> and give it a try; it is free. Or you can install Jitsi and run your own
I did try the hosted instance (meet.jit.si) ;) It worked perfectly,
although I have no idea how well it would scale to dozens of users, and
how reliable / usable it would be in production use.
> server. And Jitsi is open source. What more could you ask?
I am indeed strongly tempted to try that. I suppose I'm just spoiled by
Debian - I almost always install stuff from the repos, and I tend to
assume (probably somewhat unreasonably) that if something isn't there,
there's a good reason for it, and that installing manually from
upstream is going to be more trouble than it's worth (at least for me
with my limited sysadmin skills). I acknowledge that this is an overly
narrow and pessimistic attitude ...
> >I'm actually puzzled by why there doesn't seem to be any easy, solid
> >libre alternative to Zoom.
>
> Jitsi is easy. Do you have reason to say that the current release of
> Jitsi is not "solid"? And is Zoom worthy of consideration?
Only the fact that Jitsi has been booted from Debian due to quality (or
compatibility) problems and hasn't made it back in three years. I'm
currently using Zoom since
a) Everyone in my social and professional circles are using it and
b) It just works.
As above, 'b' is satisfied by the hosted instance at meet.jit.si, so
assuming it scales well and works in production, I'd definitely prefer
that, at least for cases where I'm not dependent on the preferences of
others.
Celejar
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