I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.
Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.
Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.
I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.
I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.
I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.
I thought people would learn how to use computers.
It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.
Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.
“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”
No, I fucking wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t like to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of that fact.
If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn’t want to accept middle-click to paste text where that’s an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.
KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.
I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.
Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.
Yes, I do know how old Blender is.
I am not a doctor and I am definitely not your doctor, but this sounds like an eating disorder to me. Are you in a position to talk to a doctor about it?
I hold the (possibly mistaken) belief that someone who can program everything from a web browser to a screensaver can, if they so choose, be a good sysadmin.
I also believe programmers usually don’t choose to be good sysadmins, viewing such work as an annoyance to spend as little effort on as they can get away with, which is what it looks like jwz has done here. Someone with his experience should be self-aware enough to understand who is to blame when that’s what they’re doing.
I wonder how many people have company email addresses there.
It’s a bar/nightclub. Most employees at bars don’t use email as part of their work. It would be unusual (though maybe on-brand for jwz) for bartenders to have company email addresses, for example.
Given his background, I’m certain he can do a good job of being his own IT admin if he wants to. He seems to want some of the benefits of that while having Google do the parts he doesn’t like.
Google, on the other hand seems to want to drop features that I think it intended to encourage people to migrate from ISP email accounts to Gmail 20 years ago and now sees as cruft and/or security concerns.
He does have his own mail server according to the post. He doesn’t want to store the mail long-term, filter spam, host a web mail client, or support employees setting up native mail clients.
The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.
It’s a bar.
I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.
The post makes it sound like he has a bunch of automation he likely wrote himself on incoming mail, but he wants Google to do some messy parts (spam filtering, archiving, providing a nice client). Google has no reason to want to continue doing that for him and the handful of other people doing something similar.
He’s being a bit whiny here. He was having employees use Gmail as a client for his self-hosted POP mail, which is a niche use case that likely has a brittle implementation and doesn’t make any money for Google. Gmail offers a paid product for this kind of use case, but it won’t integrate with the rest of his (likely custom) automation. He wants to self-host parts of the system and have Google do the messy bits, but he’s not their customer and probably isn’t a very good product either.
He then complains that to self-host IMAP:
My server is now responsible for storing all of their messages, including all of their spam. It is a vast amount of data. I will have to implement quotas.
It’s 2025 and that’s a silly claim. A 12Tb HDD costs the same as a couple bottles of booze, and it’s not hard to write a script that clears out spam after 30 days. The other complaints are basically UX.
Normally saying a small business owner should self-host IMAP and write scripts would be a bit unreasonable, but this is JWZ.
A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.
Depends on whether you want to convince people of your position, or you’re just explaining your own choice. The latter is fine, but the former won’t happen without better sources.
I’m not particularly horrified about the availability of AI features, but I’d rather see Mozilla focus most of its resources on core competencies. Firefox lags behind Chrome in web standards feature support, e.g. the browser scores on https://caniuse.com/. It’s also prone to making my laptop fan spin more than Chromium browser do, and people often complain about speed.
They should make the core browser better, and maybe task a couple developers to build some LLM support as an extension.
Without taking a position on the claim itself, this is a bad citation. It makes a variety of claims that either don’t hold up to basic scrutiny, or aren’t evidence that iOS has a security advantage. Here are some examples:
Open-source platform increases vulnerability surface area
This is perhaps one of the most thoroughly debunked pieces of FUD in the entire tech industry.
[Various claims about inconsistency between devices]
These are mostly true but largely irrelevant. You’re not buying an aggregate of all Android devices that exist, but a specific device with specific traits. The Android phone you should actually buy will have a security chip and many years of updates just like an iPhone.
The rigorous app review process and mandatory App Store distribution (except in EU) virtually eliminate malicious app threats for average users.
This might be a benefit when the user has no clue how to use a computer, but I expect people posting in this community are past that stage. It’s a big disadvantage for those who want to use something like Firefox (real Firefox, not a skin on Safari) with potential security and privacy upsides.
You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.