Thunderbird. Idk what you mean by old fashioned. It works fine, and you can style it with gtk themes.
On Android I use K-9 Mail, which looks modern to me.
I mean everyone has their preferences, but personally I don’t use email clients because I want to look at something pretty—I use them to read my emails. Thunderbird mostly matching my gtk theme is more than enough for me.
I don’t know if you were aware of this but K-9 Mail has joined up with the thunderbird developers and will at some point transition to thunderbird for mobile devices
Woah, that’s cool. Yeah I had never heard that but I’ve read the K-9 blog posts about it now. From the sounds of it, K-9 Mail is just going to continue developing along the same trajectory they were going on but are just going to change the branding to Thunderbird. Which is cool with me.
Wayland should be faster. What would you expect to happen? It should just work, while in the background EVERYTHING is changing.
I had assumed that I would get a somehow smoother experience (such as speed, for instance) or some other perceivable benefit, but I think Ramin Honary nicely highlighted the necessity of the change on the backend side. So your point is good, maybe I should just expect a smooth transition where I don’t notice anything.
For Freetube, it should automatically detect running on Wayland and use that. But I had one bug on Freetube only on Wayland, may be an Electron issue.
If I run the executable after downloading from the GitHub repo directly, it launches in XWayland. The additional parameters I mentioned in the post used to work to launch it in Wayland, but not anymore.
If anyone knows a client that can snooze mail on Proton and Gmail, I’d love to know about it. Until then I’m stuck using the web interfaces and their official phone apps.
My goal every day is to end the (work)day with an empty inbox. I reply to or act on messages that I can, and I snooze messages I can’t yet handle to a later date when I expect to be able to.
An empty inbox then means I’ve handled everything I could and will be reminded of everything I couldn’t yet.
I think the issue with mailmindr is that it works completely independently from the web and phone app snooze functions. Messages “snoozed” with mailmindr would not be resurfaced when not using Thunderbird which sadly makes it a no go for me. I don’t think there is really a solution to that at this time.
I can explain the difference between X11 and Xorg with an analogy to the web and web browsers: X11 is like HTTP, Xorg is like the Chrome browser. X11 is the protocol, Xorg is software that implements that protocol.
X11 is old, it was designed back in the 1980s and includes messages for drawing lines and circles and fonts on the screen. Also, back then there were a lot of “thin clients”, computers that were basically nothing but a browser, since graphics were computationally expensive and could not be done on the client computer, graphics rendering was done server side. There are lots of messages in the protocol for handling screen updates over a computer network.
Nowadays, all personal computers are powerful enough to render their own graphics, and no one needs the display server to draw individual lines or circles on screen. Vector graphics and fonts are done at the application level, not over the network. So these these messages specified in the X11 protocol are hardly ever used. Really, most of X11 (let’s say 90% of it) is not used at all, only the parts where the keyboard and mouse are defined, and how you can allocate memory to buffer a graphic and copy that buffer to the display. But you still need to maintain the Xorg software to handle everything that X11 specifies, and this is just a waste of code, and a waste of time for the code maintainers.
So basically, they decided about 10-15 years ago that since no one uses most of X11, let’s just define a new protocol (called Wayland) that only has the parts of X11 that everyone still uses, and get rid of the 90% of it that no one ever uses. Also, the protocol design takes into account the fact that most modern computers do all of their own rendering rather than calling out to a server to render for them. Also the Wayland protocol design takes into account that a lot of computers have graphics cards for accelerated graphics rendering.
Since the Wayland protocol is much simpler, it is easier for anyone to write their own software which implements the protocol, these software are called “compositors.” Finally, 10 years after some of the first implementations of Wayland, the protocol and compositors are becoming mature enough that they can be used in ordinary consumer PCs.
Thanks for such a detailed account - it really makes sense to move on from X11 based on what you write.
When I first heard about what X11 and Wayland was and how long the transition has been in the making, I found it a bit hard to believe that it should take so long. I am still not fully sure why it would take so long time to mature… is it a chicken-and-egg kind of situation where it cannot mature properly before it is more widely used, but it has not been more widely used because it was not mature enough? Or is it such a difficult task to get this right and that the development time reflects that?
And why would for instance NVIDIA GPUs continue to have issues with Wayland (and what kind of issues would actually be caused by this?)? Is that a matter of closed source drivers and lack of support from NVIDIA’s side to implement required changes? Or are such issues on a more fundamental level (i.e. architectural differences that somehow factors into this - I have no idea what I’m talking about now, I’ll stop writing…)?
Re: maturity - I think it is the latter where the problem is very complex and the dev time reflects that, it takes a long time to implement all the features people need and are used to in X11 (or, used to when coming from windows/macOS). For instance, screensharing is still not widely solved across all wayland compositors. In Gnome or KDE Plasma, it works as you’d expect. But a smaller project like river (tiling window manager that I daily drive rn) does not handle screensharing out of the box and takes some extra configuration - and even then it’s got some oddities that I didnt have in KDE.
As for your issues with NVIDIA gpus under Wayland, yes I think it comes down to driver support from NVIDIA (or the open source drivers just need to mature some more)
Closed source drivers are not really the issue. But competing graphics APIs are. With the move to Wayland open graphics drivers were updated to support the GBM graphics API which if one window manager wants to support then it gains support for all graphics drivers that use that api. But nvidia created its own api, eglstreams that to support required all window managers to write extra code for. Some refused to do that or took a long time to do.which gave shoddy nvidia support.
Some did support nvidia slowly, but then nvidia also switched to support the same api as everyone else (poorly at first but I assume it has improved over the years). Nvidia have also partly released their drivers as open source which has also helped.
Don’t forget Wayland and security into the mix as well. That seems to have caused some of the biggest issues with apps. Don’t get me wrong though, security was desperately needed. X11 had no concept of security.
My understanding is that due to X11’s design, all running GUI apps can “see” all the other apps. If you’re running a malicious program in X11, it can easily snoop what else you are doing, log your keystrokes, etc.
E.g. apps not being able to see other apps by default has caused issues for some screen recorders or screen-sharing software. Or screen readers from seeing inside apps.
Or apps not being able to see keystrokes when the app isn’t active, impacting global shortcuts (say, for example, you’re a streamer who uses a hotkey to change cameras in OBS)
A lot of Linux stuff was written with the expectation of there being zero security safeguards. With Wayland, that has changed and it’s causing issues.
The second one. Some apps were taking advantage of the fact that X allowed any program access to EVERYTHING on your screen, shortcuts, etc. Wayland ensures more control, which is excellent news, but definitely the change requires programs to adapt, and some have not (AnyDesk, for example).
It was created in a time when physical restrictions on access to the machine was enough. If you weren't meant to be in the lab, somebody found out real quick.
Wasn't just that, it was everything. DOS, early Windows, etc all didn't give a rat's ass about security. In 1986 you could just go over to your friends house and turn on their machine and just go through all their shit laid bare. I don't even think we had BIOS passwords at the time. At least the machines I used didn't. It was a wild time.
Piper is a GUI wrapper for libratbag which supports a bunch of gaming mice that is great for customizing button mapping. It doesn’t do per-app basis but once you map the mouse buttons to regular keys/commands you could use another application to do the mapping per application.
My Logitec MX Master devices can be configured on Linux via Piper. Logitech Options (the official software) is for Windows and I’ve never messed with it, even on my Windows devices. The two MX Master devices I have work plug and play and having 2 Bluetooth connections and a dongle channel lets me easily switch between my computers without swapping mice. Apparently with the official software, I could drag the mouse from one computer’s desktop to another, but I’m happy to mash the little button on the bottom to tab between devices if it saves me having to interact with another hardware manufacturer’s half advertisement/half utility app.
i havent found a mouse that doesnt work at all, but my side buttons arent working (probably my issue, but still). it more about a mouse manufacturer who treats linux users as first class citizens.
I have Corsair Harpoon RGB Pro RGP0074. It is good and precise, except the two shoulder buttons are too high, and that’s not very comfortable for a gamer. I have to reach with my thumb very far to press the upper shoulder button and that still means that I can misclick the other one very often. Zorin OS btw.
I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.
My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same shitty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.
The biggest benefits of Wayland over Xorg are to the developers maintaining it, not to the end user.
The Xorg project has become difficult to modify for new features and fixes and so they’ve decided to rewrite it.
As a result users will eventually see some benefits as Wayland implements features that were difficult to do in Xorg over time. But in the meantime it’s causing everything to be rewritten to support the new standard. And it’s a pain in the ass.
If your application works as you want on Xwayland there’s no reason to try to get it to work on Wayland native. Xwayland won’t be going away anytime soon. Eventually those applications will just switch over to Wayland and you shouldn’t need to think about it.
I gotta tell you… If you’re almost as old or young as Thunderbird that makes you a graybeard. Do me a favor. Next time you get out of a chair, try not to make a noise. We all find out we’ve turned old somehow.
Just so its clear this comment is coming from a loving place I love Thunderbird and you seem nice and I enjoyed your comment. Just razzing you a little bit as someone else who’s also around the same age as Thunderbird
It’s not something that you can really experience directly as the end user. It’s a base on which other features can be built. Most obvious would be fractional scaling.
doesn’t have to be outlook! davmail (configured with the outlook client id) can provide an imap bridge for mbsync, thunderbird, etc to access in even the most restrictive O365 environments.
That’s great but not that useful or needed. I need full exchange support for calendar, contacts etc. IMAP just doesn’t cut it
For corporate work it’s not really my stance on software that is important, it’s the company’s. And id rather be as frictionless as possible with company policy.
Give the aforementioned davmail main page a look! The diagram does a pretty good job showing it’s capabilities. Among other services, davmail bridges to LDAP (contacts) and calDav (calendar) too!
I pull my work outlook calendar and personal google with vdirsync and khal on laptop and desktop.
I get not wanting to find yourself in the crosshairs of IT policy people. And more so, having reverence for security measures. But, at least for the enterprise software I interact with, I don’t see security implications and don’t feel the effort to be frictionless is symmetric. I see the opposite. Policies increase insecure behavior and are obstacles to my job.
Methinks those making purchase and policy decisions are not those who interact with the consequences (use the software in anger). I’ve been on the receiving end of some sales pitches – the users are often an afterthought, not a priority. It’s hard to respect the spirit (if not the letter) of bad policies, especially when the polices are hostile to me-the-user and getting-my-job-done.
Currently grinding my gears: Why are we using MS Teams? Why does Teams block firefox (and safari, based on user-agent of all things!)? Why is IMAP disabled?
Teams because already use office / exchange and teams is integrated and “free”
We primarily use slack for communication, so I don’t have to use teams much, except for meetings
It’s all just tools and they work reasonably well if you use them as intended.
I don’t share your views on policies though, it’s important that people don’t do their own security assessments and follow what the ciso / security architect has intended. If you disagree, take it up with them.
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