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Comment by slipheen | Hacker News Reader

That's a very nice looking app - I like the look of it it gives me Mail.app vibes.

A mail client is always a tough thing to get right so I'm glad you're working on one

I love then idea that as the total cost (time/money/attention) of personalizing software continues to come down, more people will be able to encourage a diaspora of options, tailored to each niche.

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There’s been a flurry of vibe coded mail apps for Linux in the last couple of months. Hylki is another one. They all look basically the same too.

They will probably all be abandoned within the year.

They all look and behave better than the old known Linux mail clients.

Linux really need applications more polished, that’s what they are bringing to the table.

I agree. The other day I reinstalled some old gaming pc of mine with the latest bazzite. Then I discovered it had lots of old photos on it, but in many many backup folders.

So I had Claude whip up a super fast image browser that had some features I really like from a Mac app I use. It looks better than 90% of Linux apps, is super fast and fits me like a glove.

Of course some of these mail apps will be abandoned, but they also provide an opportunity to make things more attractive on the Linux side and win some users.

Would you like to share the app?

Here it is https://github.com/abuisman/flowlin

Ohhhh man, that is a killer idea, thanks for sharing this. I use a program called "nomacs" on Arch Linux, QT bases and super lightweight but everytime I update it requires a 5 minute recompile due to all the extra features it has that I never use. I'm totally going to make a lightweight version for myself now.

> It looks better than 90% of Linux apps

Talk about a low bar ;)

But yeah, thanks for reminding me; I've always wanted to make my own file manager and image viewer, since literally every single one out there is garbage. How is nobody able to get such basic programs right is beyond me.

What's the opportunity of you can simply use the 10% existing non-abandoned apps?

You need a secure, supported mail client first and foremost. Better looks definitely would help Linux adaption, but safety and functionality takes precedence in this case

I don't see any good reason to assume that these apps are less secure just because AI is used in the making of them. Bad developers and bad development practices existed long before LLMs.

But most bad developers were likely not making a fully-featured, useful mail client. Creating such a mail client was a proof of work, if you will.

Proof of work is not proof of security.

No, but my point that was AI coding changed the balance of a system such that a previously useful heuristic no longer works.

> They all look and behave better than the old known Linux mail clients.

Linux mail clients tend to look how the desktop toolkit look.

What is wrong with how kmail, Geary, Elementary-mail or Evolution look and behave?

Mail client has been a solved problem for decades already.

None of them could, properly, handle hundreds of thousands of emails which I downloaded from my Gmail account to my SSD.

None.

All of them slowed them to a very painful crawl.

The first time or every single time you opened them?

Doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t happen either way. Linux has a deep seated UI and UX problem.

This is really not about better or worse UX but preferences. Lazy loading means your client will be available from second 1 to open an emaik but would take ages every time you search for something. Building an index at first import allows almost instant search once it is complete.

I compared for instance evolution and outlook, evolution has always had much faster searches.

Having said that, having a bit of digital hygiene goes a long way.

> They will probably all be abandoned within the year.

This could be a proclamation for ALL vibe coded software. As a matter of fact, I think this is what marks software as "Vibe Coded". It's fun while the vibes last. The first few GitHub issues bring excitement because, "hey! people are actually using my project!". So the author prompts a few bugfixes or features. Then the GitHub issues become unmanageable. The author doesn't really KNOW why things aren't working. They can't find anything in the codebase without grep (this is true for the agents too). After awhile, it's not a good vibe anymore.

Isn't there a case to be made that GenAI makes maintenance of side hussle projects like these easier not harder?

Correct, nothing the parent mentioned is specific to vibe-coding. At best we could say it's easier to start a new project, so there could be more abandoned projects, but maintenance is either the same or easier than before.

Also, I'd like to know what "after a while" means, concretely. Seems to be working out all right for me on the 4 new apps I've started that I wouldn't have time for otherwise, thanks to AI. I'm at 184 revisions in one of the projects and it works fine so far.

this is my daily driver, and I want to keep maintaining it for the foreseeable future, I agree there are lot's of apps that end up dying. But that's not the case for Penguin Mail. And to clarify, I have used AI to develop parts of Penguin Mail, but I've also contributed a lot of code, I've been a developer for the last 30+ years and I think AI is a tool to increase productivity, embrace it :)

Visually it resembles Mail.app, but if it’s going for a similar level of functionality I think modern GNOME’s hamburger-and-three-dots-buttons approach to menus is going to become a problem.

This is one of those types of app that really benefits from a proper menubar with several top-level menus so the user isn’t stuck spelunking submenu tunnels.

I really hope we’ll see a KDE counterpart (and not in Kirigami; a proper one).

might be an idea, we'll see, not needed to be a counterpart :)

I'm not anti-AI but I really don't see why they felt the need to stuff an AI chatbox in my emails, other that "because they could".

you know, i'd like to interact with a model directly in thunderbird so i can reply to LLM bullshit with LLM bullshit more more quickly

Because "Find me that mail from last year from Peter or Pat? that I never replied to" is easier for most people then setting a bunch of filters and regex.

Quick grammar correction can also be nice. Not super important, but nice.

> find stuff

yeah, that too.

But these MUST have a local option first and foremost, this is something that any local model can do, even the smallest ones.

But even before that there would need to be a set of APIs from the DE, imho. I think that GNOME is going into this direction with their AI center, i whish KDE would start looking into that too

their website says it's only local AI

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