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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

I also carried out this experiment, mainly cos I couldn’t afford a Mac for a while. Completely agree with all his comments except: the default terminal in Ubuntu is a gazillion times better than Mac and that makes a huge difference. But ultimately productivity suites matter, webmail sucks, and all of the email clients on Linux were awful. That’s a showstopper for anyone doing a lot of office or management work.

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I have a hard time seeing, as a long time Linux user, how the default mac terminal is crap ? It's very responsive, fast, you have most of the features you need. That compared to the clunky, slow gnome terminal for example, or the many various RXVT xterm clones.

Of course, you can install iTerm2 which is even better.

> all of the email clients on Linux were awful

Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because it would forget passwords and stop syncing/sending. So I moved her to Thunderbird and now she's happy.

I've been using Thunderbird for like a decade, but I've been spoiled by Fastmail's web interface so much that I now consider Thunderbird to be one giant mess from a UX perspective.

Half the time I miss-click the first email and sort by subject. In what world would I want to sort my emails by subject!?

Search vs. filter messages, I really don't need two search bars, one is fine.

I'm annoyed that the default sort is oldest to newest, and that I have to change it for each individual folder.

Tabs really don't fit into how I consume my email. Flagging important ones is good enough.

I'd take Geary (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary) over Thunderbird any day, but lack of GPG integration is what's forcing me to stick to Thunderbird.

Yes I agree, the UI is a mess and they have made some bad design decisions. One time I was on train with my network connection dropping constantly and Thunderbird was giving me a model pop-up dialogue each time! It still gives pop-ups for updates. But it's open-source, relatively stable and reliable, and that counts for a lot.

The sad fact is that there is simply no money in building email clients. Email is a legacy technology and arguably no longer fit for purpose. We need a new standard and that's not something that BigTech has delivered yet.

agree that Thunderbird is the second best mail client I've used. But the gap is huge, and the bugs in Thunderbird were significant enough to cause me real problems in my work.

Just out of curiosity, which mail client do you prefer? Mail.app?

It's the best I've used, but it is still surprisingly buggy.

The default Mac terminal is dogsh*t, but iTerm2 is great.

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