electron VS Mumble

Still trash support on Linux too. We still cannot stream without frame rate issues and cannot stream audio with our video without piping through our mics. (the community fixed this for you: link)

SteamDeck and Linux users cannot stream properly (constant frame rate issues and absolutely no audio streaming). Its been FIXED by the community for years now (https://github.com/discord/electron/pull/22) but they just don't want to do it I guess?? If you are going to support the platform, SUPPORT THE PLATFORM. I'm not going to give you money for a product that doesn't work.

There is this https://github.com/discord/electron/tree/17-x-y from over half a year ago

But my golly gosh goodness me would I throw them a party in their honor if they would just update their 2 year out of date builtin shipped electron version that prevents all the progress we've made in the past few years from being at all relevant to their client.

You can see Discord's version of Electron on GitHub: This branch is 14 commits ahead, 2140 commits behind electron:main

The article from your quick google share says that you should use getUserMedia to capture the screen using Electron. Not only does Discord's client not use this, they even go as far as to disable it from their electron fork https://github.com/discord/electron/commit/e763956140aa6bf78f02202ab4df1e942ce672ae

They even forcefully disabled support for it in their version of electron, so there isn't even a way to use it via a betterdiscord plugin

The Discord Desktop app uses Electron and their Electron fork's source code is available on Github. If you take a look at their repo you'll see that one of the patches they apply is this one https://github.com/discord/electron/commit/ca8c921ed35c741acae57ea32c340f1eaf150044 that disables getUserMedia.

I think Sonobus is overkill. I suggest you look at a couple of relatively old-school gamer voice chat tools - Mumble or Teamspeak. Mumble is open-source and the connection is always encrypted, Teamspeak is commercial but the free tier should be fine for you - but you have to make sure to manually turn encryption on yourself. It has been a long time since I used either, so I don't know which is easier. Both of them require you to run their matching server software.

Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

There's any number of alternative chat applications available, like Element, Mumble, Teamspeak etc.

Mumble?

I think Mumble might fit what you're looking for. It's been a very long time since I've used it, but it seems to still exist: https://www.mumble.info/ - I've used previously for exactly what you're describing, events with lots of crew dispersed around and no budget for radios. I had it installed on an AP running OpenWRT so it was just a case of plugging that in and getting people to install the app and connect to it.

Along with the options already mentioned, if you're not into TeamSpeak, there is an open source alternative called Mumble which operates in the same manner. No internet required, and is supported on multiple platforms.