this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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A very interesting video about the Thunderbird Project successful donation process and how KDE can improve them by following their step.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Hopefully they'll build in support for disroot, fastmail, posteo, protonmail, tutanota, and other opensource encrypted mail agends that don't provide a bridge.

Edit: so the summary of the video is "marketing". Linux, KDE, and opensource projects in general need way better marketing. If Linux could rebrand itself as anything but "the geek thing", I bet it would be much more successful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think why Lennox seems so unapproachable by so many it's because there's so many distros and choices people get choice paralysis. And then as soon as they ask anyone about it they get 20,000 different results. Lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's true. It's a great strength to have the freedom to do anything with your hardware and software, but a great detriment to those who just want it to work. The torture of choice.

That's where marketing comes in. It guides you to the best choices for the "point and click, make it work" group of people - which are the majority.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think a lot of the issue with mainstream adoption to Linux is the software suite and not the operating system. I refused to switch to Linux because of needing MS Office (specifically Excel). I needed it for work at my previous job until they provided everyone with laptops during the pandemic. And before you say just use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, they are fine options for personal use for me. But for my productivity, switching between the two with different shortcuts was miserable. LibreOffice still pisses me off for formula auto completion. If I hit tab while making a formula, I want to go to the next parameter in the formula not the next cell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Excel does always seem to be the thing people can’t substitute, which is weird because it doesn’t seem terribly more complicated than Word (?)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Excel is vastly more complicated than Word. Word is just basic word processing. Excel has lots of data manipulation, formulas, tables, charts, plus when coupled with visual basic, scripts and macros. I could do all that stuff in LibreOffice if I only worked in LibreOffice. But having to work in Excel at the office and LibreOffice at home would've been a NIGHTMARE.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm curious what you mean by that. What exactly do you miss for these providers? (e.g. for posteo and mailbox.org, as those are the ones I am using)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Encrypted mail providers should require a bridge in order to be able to pull or send emails with. Protonmail has "Proton Bridge", tutanota has nothing. I see now that disroot, fastmail and posteo have direct SMTP access 🤔 That leads me to question: what actually is encrypted? Direct SMTP and IMAP access probably means they can read your mail.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There is encryption at rest (storage encryption), transport encryption and end-to-end encryption. E.g. Posteo has transport encryption and optional storage encryption. With activated storage encryption, Posteo cannot read your mail because the encryption key on their server is only usable with your password (which they do not store). Proton Bridge adds end-to-end encryption to Protonmail