Breaking up with Windows – need a recommendation | Hacker News Reader

Breaking up with Windows – need a recommendation

4 pointscode_Whisperer5 comments

After years (holy cow decades!) of using Windows for my day-to-day working environment, I feel it's time to move on to Linux. I've identified the apps that I use 90%-95% of the time and feel like I have good alternatives for them, with the exception of one. I will be using Linux mainly with a graphical interface, so that I can be pretty much up-to-speed from day one. As a dev/consultant in the Windows world, my main apps are a browser, a good code editor, remote desktop (mostly to Windows servers), FTP/SFTP, email, and common Office-related stuff (Excel, Word, Powerpoint). I think I've figured out substitutions for everything except the email client. Right now I use Postbox, which is great and generally meets my needs, but they do not have a Linux version. My big stumbling block for email seems to be that I tend to keep ALL emails forever, and I need to have a decent search. I also have around 15-20 different email accounts that I monitor at all times. My email storage footprint is currently around the 25GB range. Some email clients simply cannot deal with the sheer number of emails and size of data in this scenario. At the moment, I am thinking that Thunderbird might be my only option, but I used it (long ago) and seem to recall that it got slower and slower when dealing with so much data. Maybe that aspect has improved, but does anybody have recommendations for a graphical email client for Linux that can handle these requirements?

After years (holy cow decades!) of using UNIX then Linux for my day-to-day working environment, I have never felt the pull of using Windows after I left MSDOS in 1991. <grin>

Seriously, once you make the move to your new Operating System, stay there. Yes, you will have problems that arise. But don't backslide to using the familiar. Work your way past the bottleneck. You may need to Google a whole bunch of stuff that you do not realise that you don't know about. That then becomes a way to move forward.

I would give this same advice to a Linux user like myself moving across to Windows.

When I moved from MSDOS to UNIX back in 1991, there was no Google. So it was difficult. I could work my way around MSDOS with no hassles at all, but the simplest things, almost, in UNIX had me floored quite often. But persistence and trial-and-error experimentation paid off.

Probably what I'm trying to say is that you may need to find your own path to which email client is best for you. Recommendations for an email client may give you somewhere to start from, but they will never be as good as where your own experience and your own requirements will lead you.

Forget what you did in Windows, that won't really help you in Linux. It may even hold you back at times due to the different mindset and different attitudes of Linux/UNIX developers and users.

Good luck!

(And don't worry about about having gigabytes of emails hanging around. I have gigabytes of programming stuff lying around on my system, even source-code files from back in the 1980s.)

All good advice, thanks! It's daunting as 'an old' to make a switch like this. I've gone from RSTS/E to TRS-80s to CP/M to MS-DOS to Desqview/Windows and pretty much stuck with Windows since then. It's never been so much about it being a 'preference', it's just the path on which I landed. Now that I am faced with paying (again) for an operating system which, in turn, considers me to be a product to be harvested and monetized, I guess I've had enough.

I use thunderbird to read quite a few email accounts, some quite large, all of which are IMAP (not POP3), and most are hosted by gmail.

Thunderbird has a client that runs on Windows. You can try before you buy.

Thanks for the feedback. I also neglected to mention that I still use POP on many of these accounts to store/control my emails locally.

Three years ago, I picked up Mac after using Windows for decades and occasionally toying with Linux. MacOS & MBP improved my productivity a lot. Now 80% of the time I am on Mac and planning to install some Linux flavour on the other laptop.

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