TCB13

TCB13 , 3 months ago to linux in There is a school in Wisconsin that uses Linux

There’s nothing that anyone can do in 2024 in the MS Office suite of applications specifically that I can’t find a third party or cloud equivalent of to do the exact same thing.

This isn’t true. It might be close to true for a lot of situations, but not true at all. And the issue here isn’t that there isn’t an alternative, those students can learn LibreOffice and do almost everything they need with it, however once they get into a job and the company uses MS Office they won’t be be able to pick the work right away and be as productive as their peers will be. Imagine one of those students tried to apply for a backoffice job at a bank, they’ll most likely test the person’s Office skills and the student may not be able to compete the assessment and have an inferior grade to another one who always had MS Office at his school.

I’m all for FOSS but we must be very responsible when it comes to what we expose young people to and how that may impact their careers on the long run. They should have exposure to Linux, LibreOffice and have a basic understanding of them but they shouldn’t be robbed of valuable jobs skills that may make a difference just because.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to linux in There is a school in Wisconsin that uses Linux

You don’t even use windows that much in any future job. You use the software solutions you are given as a wage slave

So you’re assuming there aren’t “wage slaves” doing data entry on MS Office and also that 0% of those students won’t ever be managers or hold any other more high level job that does require those tools. So you must be against teaching financial literacy at school as well because “they won’t ever invest anything”. Great job, let’s keep the peasants illiterate in everything they actually need to climb the ladder.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to linux in There is a school in Wisconsin that uses Linux

Not everybody is a data-entry drone. I have no use for it, and I’m in a technical career.

Your manager, that most likely started his career as a tech person as most tech manager do, likely uses Office a lot and he certainly isn’t a data-entry drone. One day as you progress in your career you’ll too.

PS: whoever doesn’t understand this comment and downvote right away should really think about their life. If one doesn’t understand that a manager does need to be proficient in MS Office then you’ll never get there / have a very hard time.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to linux in There is a school in Wisconsin that uses Linux

Ahahaha, I like to think about all possible sides of a situation.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to linux in There is a school in Wisconsin that uses Linux

“There’s a school in Wisconsin that is so underfunded that they only have very old computers and the person running it barely knows hat’s a computer and thus won’t ever create a budget or approve new systems. Furthermore this school is so irrelevant they aren’t even able to qualify for free software from Microsoft. A bored teacher saved the day and made the old computers somewhat useful by installing Linux on his spare time. Of course all of this doesn’t come for free, the current generation of students never used a computer at home, just mobile devices, and are being robbed of learning a valuable and required skill for any future job - basic Windows and Office usage.”

There, article fixed for you.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to technology in Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio

Here’s what I think: if they actually do everything with open standards and PGP by the book, why can’t they provide IMAP/SMTP access to everyone who wants it BUT add the disclaimer that you’ve to use a PGP compatible e-mail client and configure it to deal with the encryption… they could even configure their submission to refuse any email that isn’t PGP encrypted to improve things further. The fact that they don’t do this leads me to believe that they either a) aren’t actually doing everything as “by the book PGP” and there might be security issues or b) they’re “privacy” as a catch all excuse in order to push a bit of vendor lock-in.

Their market niche is privacy conscientious people and those same people tend be to computer savvy and I bet half of them would mind setting up PGP on Thunderbird and use Proton without a bridge. Everyone else could still use their apps, web or the bridge.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to technology in Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio

You actually pose an interesting question, what happens if they go down. How much time will their apps / cache work? We don’t know.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to selfhosted in Best resources to learn more about networking

Start by replacing your ISP-provided router with something that runs OpenWrt and explore around.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to selfhosted in what will be my next server operating system (Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS), your experience and opinion

You next OS will be… Debian. Because you care about your time and you want stuff to be stable.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to selfhosted in what will be my next server operating system (Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS), your experience and opinion

Or, better yet, LXD/Incus.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to technology in Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio

I agree 100% with your ideia. The best path for this would’ve been for them to actually design that system you describe and THEN implement it on Dovecot and Postfix in their own fork or a Dovecot extension / Postfix add-on so others would start using them. Eventually after some times and other providers also optionally supporting the thing an RFC could be written. This is the usual course we see with protocols/extensions and is what should’ve happened here.

I want to share another thing, before Snowden there was Lavabit, they also did “encryption at rest” and the user password involved for some parts of the information and it was proven to be effective. It wasn’t a perfect model but it was certainly better than the havoc Proton did to e-mail by opening the precedent that is okay not to run on standard protocols.

What Proton is doing to e-mail is about the same that WhatsApp, Messenger and others did to messaging - instead of just using an open protocol like XMPP they opted for their closed thing in order to lock people into their apps. People in this community seem to be okay with this just because they sell the “privacy” cool-aid.

server-to-server communication, like for automatic pgp key negotiation, would be nice too.

I’m not sure if this is required. Any decent e-mail server uses TLS to communicate these days, so everything in transit is already encrypted.

Still, Proton has a easy to access data export that doesn’t require a bridge client or subscription or anything. I think that’s required by GDPR.

Yes, they have it because GDPR does require it. It works, but it’s not a real time sync alternative to anything and it is some kind of vendor lock-in.

As I said in other comments, not using standard protocols only makes thing worse. I used iOS as an example, for Android you can get a bridge but that’s just going to be one more thing going for your battery.

Now, consider this, there’s a TON of situation where having a standard SMTP-capable provider is interesting. Maybe you’re running in iOS, maybe you want to have an ESP32 to send a few emails, or some custom software in your computer. All those use cases are impossible or require more coding and more non-standard solutions just because Proton decided to be the first provider ever not to use standard protocols.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to linux in OpenSUSE has the best installation menu of any OSs ever made

Isn’t that ReactOS? :P

TCB13 , 3 months ago to linux in OpenSUSE has the best installation menu of any OSs ever made

There you go, peasants.

TCB13 , 3 months ago to technology in Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio

And, and what will happen when they decide to discontinue the bridge? What happens when you’re running on iOS and you can’t have the bridge? You’ll be forced into their apps, that’s pretty locked. Besides does the bridge even provide contacts and calendars to Thunderbird? Last time o checked it didn’t. What about notes?

TCB13 , 3 months ago to technology in Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio

The issue not that you can’t export in bulk, you’re locked into their apps daily. Every other email provider out there uses standard protocols that allow for any client to be used.

Besides, the export feature is all fun until you actually have to use it. There’s a bunch of metadata that gets lost, contacts, calendars and notes are exported in JSON with propriety structures that other systems can’t deal with. Note that there’s also CardDAV/CalDAV as open and interoperable solutions for those issues and they device not to use them.