52 Libre Riot Desktop

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Making a Libre Replacement for Riot Desktop

Screenshot: Riot in IceCat

As you may or may not know, there is a controversy over Chromium. LibrePlanet says Chromium might not be free, while Debian includes it in main. In addition, Parabola recommends removing all Chromium code, including Electron, which is a component of Riot Desktop.

This is bad news for the Riot Desktop. To be a free software Skype replacement, it must work without proprietary softare or dependencies. Luckily, little sacrifice is needed for this. Instead of using the desktop app, just run it in IceCat.

But, I know what you're thinking. This is ugly! That's true! But, we can easily change that, and I'll show you how. All it takes i s just a few steps.

Setup

First, create a new profile.

  1. Open the Profile Manager from the terminal: icecat -P
  2. Click Create Profile...
  3. Click Next
  4. Under Enter new profile name:, type Riot
  5. Take note of the folder where your profile will be saved, and press Finish

Now, set up IceCat.

  1. Go to Preferences
  2. In the Home Page text entry box, type https://riot.im/app/
  3. In your file manager, go to ~/.mozilla/icecat/ and click on the folder with Riot in its name. (If you don't see the hidden folder .mozilla/ in your home directory, try revealing them with Ctrl+H or Ctrl+.)
  4. Create a folder called chrome and go into it.
  5. Create a plain text file called userChrome.css and open it. Make sure the letter C is capitalized!
  6. Paste the following code into the file.
    @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
    #navigator-toolbox { display: none }
        
  7. Save the file and restart IceCat.

You should now have a version of IceCat dedicated to running Riot.

Issues

There are a few #issues with the setup.