If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.

I have nothing Microsoft at home.

Yeah, sure, I'm an IT geek, but it's probably the first time that's happened since I first used a DOS disk back in the day (as before that all my computers weren't PCs at all but small home computers).

Windows 11 literally forced me off Windows at home, I haven't run Office at home in decades, and I now need to be paid to manage Microsoft systems of any kind.

Microsoft told me that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows. And you know what? In my case, they were right.

One of the best things of running Linux instead of Windows is that even if I choose to install a binary driver, it doesn't come with a bunch of "companion" apps and background services and a 4GB LLM, a game launcher, an update program, and whatever other nonsense people want to shovel onto me.

Because if it did, distros would revolt and/or ship a version that was just the driver.

You're a graphics card. Act like it. All you need is a driver, nothing more, nothing less.

I like updating my Vivaldi browser.

The apt version just sets a flag during the update and any currently-running Vivaldi browser picks up on it and shows a small "update" button in its browser bar.

You can just carry on using it, obviously. Or you click the small update button and it will update the browser and carry on.

I love the way that it's a) part of the entire apt system so still under your control, b) apt upgrades don't need to kill/restart applications (Windows really needs to learn this), and c) it just detects an update underneath, lets you know, and waits for you to decide when your want to close your browser.

It's very subtle and very simple, but it's a whole world of difference compared to Windows, and a show of how an application and an OS update mechanism can co-operate to the user's advantage.

Too little, too late.

I moved on to better OS when you started messing with stuff and REFUSED to even give me an option to put it back how it was.

Modern Windows UI/UX literally and actually hinders my workflow because of enforced nonsense that I don't want.

Boils down to one thing:

Teach them.

Homework doesn't teach them - that's "independent learning" which, though a skill, isn't something you can really instil in them, but which they have to bother to learn themselves... it's also, incidentally, how private schools achieve results. They encourage independent learning, and they more use it to PREPARE, rather than after-the-lesson chores. "This is what we'll be doing next week, read up on it now so I don't have to explain all the minutiae when we get to that part."

But without a teacher in the class, the significance of where/what they learn is diminished and turns learning into a chore. The biggest assets in a school - any school - are not budgets, facilities, fancy tech... it's parental motivation, and teacher skill. Private schools already have parental motivation ("I lose 30k if you mess about", says Dad, and the school won't tolerate you risking their 600k of tuition income across that class just to keep your 30k).

His last paper was a multi-year study on the different methods to teach boys and girls science (especially physics) and maths in Kuwait (where they have segregated classes for such things) to achieve best results for each... I'll see if I can dig it out.

Well... I think "delivered" is stretching it somewhat.

So far only Pepsi has some hand-built models. It's gonna be years before their earliest larger orders are even close to being fulfilled.

RAM isn't the issue.

But some software is trapped forever in old, outdated (and insecure) versions and never gets updated.

Some software is trapped in a "bottle" and you can't explore the filesystem (e.g. you can't save your downloads / other files created in it anywhere sensible without tweaking a load of things).

And some software just plain doesn't work but it's still on the store.

If I were to introduce a newbie to Linux, they would be led to use snap, and so much would be incredibly frustrating / out of date / not work that they'd think it was awful. I think snap does Linux a MAJOR disservice. I would have to recommend people switch the Ubuntu store to prefer apt, for example, before I could just leave them to use it on their own.

My father-in-law is one of the most highly-educated people I know (several PhD's in education, etc. plus any number of bachelors, masters, etc. in all kinds of subjects), and teaches all over the world and is HIGHLY sought-after. Chinese schools were offering him huge sums, Kuwait, the US, Spain, UK, all over.

He has a bunch of published papers on education, and has been teaching for over 40 years.

He has always, and still is, against homework in all forms.

Same guy, for reference, who took a job at a school in Spain purely to get my daughter a place in one of the top private schools there. The condition of him working there was that she got a free place. They agreed.

He took the worst classes and transformed them within a year. To the point that the school accused him of cheating on the exams. So, because his students loved him so much, he had another teacher set another exam, and the same students VOLUNTEERED to come back under exam conditions, sit a similar exam, in invigilated conditions, without any influence, connection or presence of him... and they all passed on their own merits... every one. Not just passed. A's all around.

Then he left, because he was insulted by the accusation. But he just needed to prove his point.

Any number of doctors, lawyers, etc. owe their education to him, all over the planet.

And he hates homework and never sets it or, if he's forced to, it's always pathetic and he doesn't bother marking it. He thinks it's an absolute waste of time.

As someone who has, similarly, spent their entire career in education... I can't say I disagree with him on that.

Oh, good, they're only snaps.

Because snaps are shite and I turned them off.

Brand-new, fresh, Framework, highly-Linux-supported laptop, clean install of Ubuntu on it, over Christmas.

I'm willing to try almost anything... so I went with the defaults.

And within the first week I found myself uninstalling every snap package and replacing it with a traditional apt one.

Steam snap - simply doesn't work. It makes it look like Steam is shite, in fact, and it loads but NONE of the games work properly. Uninstalled the snap, used the "Steam recommended" download/method, and it worked perfectly every since.

Vivaldi snap - downloads and stores shite in ridiculous paths that you can't find easily. Constantly out of date. Gave up trying to play nicely with it, copied the data to the apt-package locations and it worked perfectly with predictable (and useful) paths immediately. Uninstalled the snap.

qBittorrent, Shotcut, VLC, etc. - all had RIDICULOUS problems with the snap version and I'd had enough by then so I just uninstalled them, disabled the store install snap by default, and used apt for everything.

Roll out what you like via snap, because I ain't gonna be touching it. Honestly... I tried. I tried not to be an old fuddy-duddy Linux guy and to just use the stuff they foisted on a "new user" to "get with the times". And I lasted a week.

And this is someone who had the patience to run Slackware 3.9 as a primary desktop for many, many years, build their own distro, modify and compile their own kernels, etc.

I was honestly hours away from just choosing another distro until I realised what the core problem was and just got rid of snap.

I can't believe anyone ever looked up to that twat.

Honestly, working in tech, I had conversations with a number of people who should know about things, going back decades, and they absolutely couldn't get why I couldn't stand the man, or his companies, or his actions.

People commented on me closing my Twitter (yes, Twitter) account.

He was a clearly-identifiable twat, WAY, WAY, WAY before things like the Thai cave divers, WAY before he just bought and bankrolled companies for the sake of it, etc. Back to the "I founded Paypal" days (no, you didn't).

Sorry but like Trump - I judge you for EVER having giving a damn about anything the man has ever said. Or almost any "tech celebrity" come to that, especially the ones - like Musk, Jobs, Bezos, etc. - with absolulely zero personal technical knowledge, expertise or skill.

They're salesman. Bad ones. And people fall for it like they fall for dodgy car dealership patter all the time. And I honestly can't fathom how people DON'T SEE THAT.

Don Quixote was quite literally delusional and insane.

It's hiliarious that Trump keeps unwittingly aligning himself with that character. I very much doubt he's ever read A book, even his own, let alone that one, though.

Notice how, in each case, he's screwed over the people he was actually trying to help, plus a huge amount of collateral damage.

Why anyone aligns themselves with him, I can't fathom. He has no loyalty to even his own sycophants and overseers, and when he does try he just ends up screwing them over even more.

And their custodians are doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT IT.

Still.