livebsd

I used to run flashy DEs years ago. Enlightenment for all those who remember, with all the bells and whistles turned on.

As years went by, I started to remove everything. I now use an automatic tiling window manager with no borders. I actively disable all animations, and I use colors much more thoughtfully (color yes, but only where it is needed), so that by default my laptop looks a lot more like those old screenshots than a today colorful tablet.

I'm now quite pedantic on how text should be rendered the way _I_ want, and it should be the same _everywhere_.

So in a sense, I see why the current look is attractive and my younger-self would approve, but in retrospective the bland-but-consistent look is what I eventually moved on to by choice for a lot of reasons.

The current UI trend in my mind is considerably worse from an UI perspective than what Windows 3.1/95 (and same-era DEs) would offer.

Google Groups is horrendous. The mailing list interface works, which is fine.

However the web interface and search results are a true PITA. Waiting for the page to load just to jump to a random point in the page takes in the order of 5+ seconds on my system.

I remember the first iteration of groups was almost pure html and insanely fast. Like with most google products, it has been bloated to death.

I've been managing my own mail server since forwever (when nanae was still a thing: news.admin.net-abuse.email).

SPF is not too bad as far as forging countermeasures work. It's relatively simple both to implement and to check. I'm not against it.

What I don't like is every single other standard they pushed later. I personally think DMARC is borderline useless. DKIM is plainly horrid and breaks just about everything you'd expect from email such as mailing lists, while not solving anything both from a legitimacy perspective and from a spam perspective.

Like everybody says, the "recommended" solution is to pour each and every of these half-assed solutions into a score system. Which sucks, because when a legitimate email is rejected, the fix is never trivial: it could be just a perfectly legitimate host which decided that all these solutions are crap (and they're right).

You know my current 90+% spam and scamming source by volume? It's gmail.com. It's passing all these checks, of course. It's the reason I consider DKIM virtually useless even from a legitimacy perspective: a valid DKIM signature from any large/free email provider bears no significance to the point that even if I had a decent UI for validation in my email client, I would basically have to avoid it: "oh, right, another legit scam from gmail.com".

For a long time, this has been a great resource:

http://onethingwell.org/

It's not exclusive to OSS though.

These seem to measure project popularity more than anything else. Of big projects. Of which you can choose among several similar ones.

The success of a OSS project lies in the hands of the user. There are projects done by a single developer over a decade, with zero contributors and with rare commits (or god forbid -- no repository!). In a niche which is too technical for a casual contributor, yet it does exactly what you need.

This is still 100% success to me, and represents what OSS is all about.

Big OSS projects backed by companies are a different breed of commercial endeavor.

If you need an _email_ client, implementing support for the exchange protocol is probably the least of your concerns.

Even if the exchange protocol was open, I wouldn't implement support for a specific vendor knowing there are protocols which are more commonly used.

Microsoft could instead start by improving their implementation of IMAP in exchange, which is one of the most horrid and buggy implementations of IMAP I've ever seen. This is also true for their IMAP endpoint at office365.com.

But it's clear where they stand: outlook is the ultimate corporate lock-in, and it's not due to email by itself.

As of "lately" in the sense of "in the last 10 years", it was always great. Freetype always had great rendering, on part and often superior to both ClearType and OSX to my eyes.

I attribute the bad perceived performance of freetype to the lack of good and/or commercial fonts.

The default configuration in most distributions is decent, but with little tuning everything can be changed to your taste. I ran with grayscale AA since the beginning because I find the color fringing annoying.

I also used to like the bytecode hinter, but in the last years with my laptop having 120+ dpi, I find the freetype autohinter to be actually superior as it better preserves the letterform and provides sharper results even without subpixel AA.

The settings can also be tailored per-font, and apply system-wide, with the exception of some stupid QML and Electron apps.

No, it's mostly because Qt5 apps also start to use QML widgets, which are quite a bit inferior in just about everything. Higher latency, a "touch like" feel (fatter borders in general, overall lower display density), respond in a different way (scrolling), and so on.

I always was a great fan of both GTK2 (for the UI) and Qt4 (for the API). GTK3 made me switch to Qt4 for development. Qt5 brings some improvement, but as a user I absolutely hate QML.

I really wished THIS would be the DEFAULT behavior of GTK3. If you read this in reverse, you realize how BROKEN GTK3 is compared to GTK2.

It doesn't make any sense.

Well, it's a true full "undo" behavior. It's a bit annoying at times because edits are not grouped, but you can see your entire editing history when you're undoing: no edit is ever lost in this manner.

As typical in emacs, this is not the only undo behavior you can have. undo-tree behaves very similarly to vim by default, but still preserves the entire editing history (with branching), which is visible graphically with "C-x u".