HOWEVER - I've yet to find a good email client. Kmail is good, but uses Akonadi with is a disaster, and literally doesn't work. I have to restart it multiple times a day, because it silently stops working. I have found bug reports about this issue going back years which are either ignored or marked fixed, which it clearly isn't.
Don't say Thunderbird.
Managing multiple email accounts in a single interface.
Easily moving emails between different accounts and from online to offline.
Relatedly, storing years of emails with attachments on a local drive is cheap. Storing them in webmail is a hefty subscription fee. I have no issue with one time payments, but I like to minimize subscriptions.
My only explanation is that local search is inherently cross-team and integration-heavy. Consequently, if there's no higher-org prioritization it just molds and breaks over time, as unaddressed integration bugs pile up that cannot be fixed by a single team.
Companies shipping their dysfunctional org chart.
Still, I never thought I'd say that I could do things with the built-in search 20 years ago that I can't today.
Having that in one place, is essential.
The beauty of gnus is that it's elisp all the way down. So if you don't like something, it's most likely configurable.
Hmmmmmm, why are you saying that?
I'm using *** for 20 years. Even when I was on Windows years ago. *** might not be fancy, but just works. And IME works very reliably.
Thunderbird. Seriously though, why do people hate on it so much? I use it on all of my non-mobile devices and the latest version out of the box (at least for Linux desktops) is really sleek.
My only issue is Google Calendar integration, and that's only because auto-generated calendar entries suck and cannot be dismissed. When those events pop up, I just click on the link in the notification which takes me to the email and calendar view, and I delete the auto-gemerated event on the Gmail website.
So, twice a year I compact my mailboxes, and I put a sqlite command loop to vacuum in my main cleanup script. Which I run maybe once a month.
Yes, strictly speaking I shouldn't need to do this, but my tbird install has been running happily for decades now.
You search for a solution to this, you get plenty of hits of people trying to revert the UI. I'm not alone with this opinion. It's an email client, it's not supposed to be new and exciting. The interface was fine.
All I really want is working Kmail. It's boring in the best kind of way.
Telling me "There's no way to revert it" feels like, at best, giving up at the sign of the smallest difficulty. At worst it's a bad-faith argument, as it's clearly possible - and fairly easy and straightforward, IMO.
Mozilla themselves called it "Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch", and as we know, rebuilding something from scratch is a great idea, and improves the product on all metrics always.
In my opinion, it's a travesty. I refuse to use it. I would rather use broken Kmail.
Also nextcloud email maybe?
For the last two decades or so I've been running Linux for everything (personal and work) except for gaming. I'm to the point of being sufficiently annoyed with Windows that I'm going to set up a Linux disk for gaming to see how that goes. I've used Wine etc. for gaming sporadically throughout the years. Recently that landscape has improved quite a bit thanks to Valve.
That being said, I personally use proton compatibility to gauge whether a game is worth my time so I'm not too bothered by this. And I'm constantly surprised by how much the Venn diagram of games that don't run on Linux and games that have off-putting bullshit unrelated to Linux looks like a single overlapping circle.
Furthermore, more recently they have debuted VACNet, which uses machine learning, most likely to recognize certain patterns and behaviors associated with cheating. Probably still avoidable if one were to use subtle settings and knows how to act properly. But it shows they haven't given up and are trying to explore alternative methods at least. I'm admittedly not familiar with how successful it has been as I have not been playing or even following the game for a long time.
as a non-online gamer, what's so terrible about VAC? I had heard it worked pretty well (at least for counterstrike).
False bans cannot be appealed. They do happen. [1] You have no power to deal with them when they happen, and they really, really do happen. [2] You don't just get a game or server ban, you lose pretty much everything, and it becomes a public permanent record. Unless you're part of a headline, you have zero chance of reversal.
[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C...
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/counter-strike-2-players-banned-fo...
[2] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1535786-valve-urges-amd-user...
VAC is designed around obscurity. When it detects a cheat it flags the account, and then an indeterminate amount of time later it/Valve bans all the flagged accounts. It makes it much harder for cheat devs to figure out what exactly flagged VAC, but the lack of an immediate ban means that normal players are still putting up with cheaters day in day out.
Another caveat is that VAC only bans you from the game engine. So you could get VAC banned from Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, yet still be free to hack on Counter-Strike 2.
Also considering how many of Valve's titles are free, there's no wonder why hacks are so prolific in their games.
I don't really care how easy or difficult Linux is, I'm done with Windows.
(On the upside: holy cow some computers work way better with Linux. A crappy $100 Chromebook I had lying around gets over 30 hours of battery life with my normal use now, it's insane. It has become my go-to "just chuck it in a bag for whatever" machine because I can forget to charge it for weeks and it's fine)
My only real complaint is the pretty crappy screen, it's one of those cheap LCDs that drastically changes color/contrast/etc as you move away from the tiny perfect viewing angle... but that screen is probably a moderate amount of the reason why the battery lasts so long.
When fully charged and on low brightness, Mint claims I have ~77h of battery life. It's definitely over-estimating, but 30 is totally reachable while I'm doing my normal stuff (likely not on high brightness tho). And when closed I lose like 2%/week, noticeably better than any other laptop I've ever had.
People have actually written apparmour configs to prevent that: https://sergei.nz/stop-google-chrome-from-hijacking-mimes/
But yes, it's pervasive, and I would love a way to intercept it. I don't care what they want, it's my phone.
pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.android.chrome
With MacOS dropping subpixel support for text and with the cleartype patents expiring, Linux font rendering just keeps getting better while the others stay the same or get worse. I can't really conceive any reason to stay on Windows now unless you're a hardcore gamer.
That said, really dark pattern to enable stuff users have explicitly said no to. Microsoft really is a two-headed monster these days. Parts of Windows is really good, but then there's shit like this that just ruins it.