The ‘Steam Controller’ I think it was called? That thing was so awful I only used it like twice.

What’s wrong with the built in windows firewall? It works well, has a GUI to add rules, etc… You don’t even need to touch it on a default setup for most people.

I’m amazed you find Element easier to use, their idea of cramming a pile of channels into a “home” that you can’t even see unless you specifically look for it is absolutely bizarre, and you can’t make voice rooms either, you have to enter a text chat and then start a ‘call’ which is odd.

Revolt seems like it would be a good replacement if it gets to a stable point.

Other than that everything else is nowhere within miles of being a discord replacement. The best option IMO would be a regular chat server like Matrix/Element or something, and Teamspeak or Mumble for voice. But you won’t have streaming, screen sharing, etc.

Everything like Element, Jitsi, and so on are replacements for stuff like Slack, they don’t have easy to use voice rooms or streaming or anything like that.

With federation between different Matrix servers, what’s the holdup? Why aren’t people leaving Discord?

Poor usability, confusing to get started on, your instance may just vanish at some point, annoying encryption system you have to verify new devices on, feels slow on both browser and in app, lack of features (ie; no low latency game streaming, rich presence, easily joinable voice rooms).

It also shares the same issue as Mastodon, where if your instance vanishes you can’t just log in with your account on another one and have everything ready to go, because the account is tied specifically to that original instance.

Overall as a fairly techy type user I still find Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc all pretty frustrating to use.

I’d say get a basic kitchenaid mixer and just cook on the stove (or induction plate).

Combining stuff especially with modern software generally does not go well.

Lots of good recommendations here!

For user friendly software Veeam Endpoint, Synology Active Backup, and Duplicati would be my top 3. They all let you restore easily with a GUI that is easy to navigate, support email notifications natively for failures/warnings, and support VSS on windows without external scripts.

Kopia, Restic, and similar open source projects also work well on a technical level, but are about the farthest thing from user friendly as they require custom scripting to perform VSS snapshots before backup and send notifications after, and are not very easy to use for restoring files.