What is the crowd's opinion of Rambox?

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Another recommendation is RamBox where you can create a tabbed view of several electron apps. I use mine to always have a messenger, messages, keep, calendar and inbox running in a small window on one of my screens.

>only does sms and FB messenger. missing everything else.

There is also Telegram and there used to be WhatsApp too I believe, not sure about the current status on that.

>pidgin is just.... bad...

Well, you wanted a "combined minimal ad-free feed" so it is the best option. There are several plugins for it if you are missing on something specific.

Alternatively, there are wrapper programs Rambox and Franz which don't put things to one feed, but at least one window.

Got bit by this too. Station was great, I don't think we're getting it back. There are a few open source alternatives that you can try and I'm about to: Rambox has a community edition and Franz (which I haven't tried) but I think is the same vein. Shift is the big commercial alternative, but I always liked Station better. You're actually inspiring me to dig into these two a bit more today as I've really missed station and tabbing between all my apps just isn't great. Anyway, with these two, at least with the open source backing even if they decide to pull the plug you can always keep the source and reinstall... Hope one of these works for you. I don't think you'll get Station back from what I could find. Check back if one of these is a perfect fit, I'll do the same.

I feel your pain. The correct way to solve this wold be to consolidate everything onto one app (isn't that what what CVR was supposed to be?), but barring that, I found that something like rambox helps a bit.

https://rambox.pro/ or Franz

The pro version of Rambox is worth paying for because it has automatic background tab suspending and you can temporarily disable individual tabs or groups of tabs, so you have full control over resource usage. It also alerts you when tabs are naughty and try to use a lot of memory/CPU while backgrounded.

For social media there is Rambox, yes, it can do WhatsApp too. For "Music app" just use spotify, your distribution should have a package for it. Or do you mean a music app in general? If yes, what should the features be?

Check out Rambox for WhatsApp support. It also supports a slew of other apps as well. They have a community edition that state will be free forever. They offer AppImage and RPM installs in their Github page. https://rambox.pro/#pricing

Short answer: Nothing official, but totally doable.

Long answer: your best bet is either a pinned tab in your browser, or something like Franz or Rambox. Franz / Rambox will provide an always-open application, and as one of your tabs you can load the Google Voice web interface. I use Rambox, and in addition to GV, I've got Hangouts, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and Slack in different tabs. Works great for me.

There is an open source project that lets you use multiple web chats (like Facebook, Steam, Discord, etc.) in one program; similar to the services you linked in your post. Perhaps this is what you are looking for: https://rambox.pro/#ce

There are Rambox and Franz which both seem to do what you're looking for.
They're open source but not entirely free. Due to the availability of the code you can easily 'circumvent' the paid plan though. I have a few custom recipes running in Franz.

Have you read the privacy policy as well? It uses Google Analytics, which IMO is a huge privacy concern.

Also having an account with an email/username and password is always risky. Use good passwords. Perhaps with a password manager.

Have you taken a look at Rambox.pro?

It is the same idea as Franz, open source, without necessary logging in (it is optional). And no google analytics.

Not wanting to shill a program ofcourse.

Both Franz and Rambox are built upon Electron. Basically a chromium browser with code built in HTML CSS and Javascript, whereas JS could be dangerous, seeing the amount of exploits released yearly e.g cross site scripting and so on.

If you're willing to install, you can use Rambox to aggregate all of your chat services - texts, whatsapp, hangouts, discord, etc. It separates them all into tabs, and it un-clutters your desktop if you use more than one communication service.

And it's basically just the web version with custom CSS. :x

I'd put that in my Rambox.

I get that Electron apps are "hyped" for developers: They're rather easy to set up, look fine in a short amount of time and are easy ported to several OS.

But it comes to the price of memory-hogging and that's really extreme. Also those web apps themselves aren't really optimized so over time they consume even more memory and that's an issue.

I don't have much trouble on my 32 GB desktop, but with my 4 GB notebook I go to the limit pretty fast. Open a browser, two electron apps and well, not much left now.

I mean, Electron apps on the first sight look gorgeous: CSS is the shit! But then after some time playing around with them, you realize that they're "all by themselves". If the programs had been made with Qt or GTK or whatnot, they could look pretty the same, but also have one big advantage: consistency. I mean, every Electron app I use looks very different, colorschemes, how buttons and menus are ordered, etc. Beside the memory issue, that's the real disadvantage it comes with.

They may seem intuitive with their fancy new GUIs, but… for every app I have to look twice where its function and buttons are placed.