Not really, the full report refuted this. Issue in Spain was much more nuanced. Mostly related to lax voltage controls and outdated and slow control mechanisms at the grid, high voltage net.
Thunderbird of now is more annoying and less convenient to use than when I last time used it in 2010's, before I moved to claws-mail.
And only reason using it now is cos of MS fucked up oauth2 method that is PITA to setup for any other OSS client as it requires the app to be added to their catalog and only thunderbird was big enough to get that
To be honest while I’m not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I struggle to understand how this is true by any measure.
The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint.
My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.
So thunderbird have 2 search bars, one on top, other in directory itself. The top one does what I'd expect browser search bar do, opens new tab and search everywhere, the bottom, again, inside a directory listing, I expect to search within directory.
If you type text, it does that, filtering messages in current view
If you type text and press enter, it does exact same thing the top one does, searchs everywhere, instead of the fucking directory I explicitly clicked and navigated to the other search bar
But fine, that's a quirk, you can get used to it... if not for how bad the opened search window is.
You get a list of messages where there is just enough text to not know whether you care about content of the message and whole thing fits like 4 mails (I get hundreds a day from various system stuff of hundreds of servers) and the ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE is empty and unused, and as it defaults to showing all mail, not mail in directory I was in, it's mostly useless. It also only shows last part of the path, not the whole dir mail is so instead of <A>/<B> dir you just get B
BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE. THEY MADE BETTER VIEW!
Just click on "Show results as list". Its just a list with a browser, same you get with normal directory browsing. It still wasted space, but it's at least usable
Let me just use the search to narrow down the list.... oh, it for some reason stopped searching in message bodies despise "body" option being selected and the same setting working in "main" directory search... and guess what enter does ? Of course, contrary to all good UI/UX design, it will run another tab with search that forgot your original query so when you might think you could narrow it down, nope
I've been using Thunderbird for my email for a very long time. Probably since some early 1.0 release.
In these years, I've also had it on Windows and Linux, I've migrated it easily across many OS installs and hardware changes, I've used it with different kinds of email accounts and servers. It's worked with PGP encrypted mail, with SpamAssassin on the server and more.
It's great. It doesn't change much, which is probably a good thing, Firefox lost me as a user at some point. Thunderbird mostly stays the same, adding features occasionally. As I write this, I realize I'm so used to Thunderbird I'm not even sure what other clients are available. Definitely one of the best programs I've used.
I used to be a pretty heavy NNTP user... at some point, while it was largely left to rot, NNTP features themselves became much harder to use... the fact that the leading button on posts now "reply" is an email to the author of a post, instead of a response post is beyond me, and changing the behavior got worse release after release.
The fact that they haven't invested in anything resembling a companion set of services for shared calendar/contacts is also a heavy pain point in contrast to the use of GMail or Outlook/M365/Exchange. If they had offered hosted email/calendar/contacts alone as a monetization option, they could have done so well ahead of GMail or M365 options and could still do so and under-cut them... having an open-core suite just for communications.
They've left a lot of options out there to die... they effectively had Electron a few decades before Electron was a thing. XulRunner was pretty nice to use, and they just left it to die... it got worse over time and just stopped seeing updates. All the while, the charity org and business org just kept spinning their wheels and basically throwing money away... for decades now.
I can't get it to save emails that I've corresponded with on the Android app. I always have to find specific emails in the email history, and then "Compose message to". If I try to start a new email and start typing the name, or email address, there's no dropdown, no suggestion. Have you ever had this issue on Android?
I've been hit by that bug, although it only deletes mail AFAIK. There's a separate bug that completely corrupts the mail database on compaction, making Thunderbird lock up including for every future launch.
Its a beautiful open source effort but products that have bugs like that languish for 10-20 years just aren't reliable. I need my mail client to be reliable.
Yes, FUD and long held myths can be found anywhere. But speaking as a staff member and someone who has seen first hand user reports, here is some straight shooting:
* there are rare cases of a profile either misplaced (exists but not correctly pointed to) or gone - it is something which I understand Firefox people are working on (Thunderbird uses the Firefox profile system)
* there are extremely rare reports where prefs.js is corrupted
* there are no compact failures in current versions - there are no open bug reports for recent versions, so it has been totally obliterated by a rewrite and subsequent fixes. Most user reports of compact failure are attributed to other causes of folder corruption
* folder corruption can occur as easily from external sources as from product bugs.
Also, beware drawing broad conclusions about other users' experience from one's own personal experience. I have almost never experienced corruption - once in the last 10 years. But I am also using a Thunderbird profile that has gone through 5 different laptops, two different OS, using daily builds, which is AMPLE opportunity to have had multiple catastrophic failures. But because I know other users experiences I consider myself lucky.
Although in recent years it looks like it turned from a bug about one specific (never resolved) issue to a more general troubleshooting session related to data loss issues.
I used to maintain a mailbox in dropbox that tended to work across my mac, linux and windows environments... it was pretty great... at some point a few incompatible releases across the environments broke everything and had other bugs that I could no longer revert from. I pretty much haven't touched it in a while.
Gmail has ads inline that are hard to distinguish from real emails. What kind of self-respecting person uses that when they have the technical knowhow to spend time on hackernews (i.e. options)?
1. web is too slow compared to any decent desktop client. thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically instant from human perception, web version operations are visible to human eye.
It's bad enough so many of us have to get our emails through them. Adding even more tracking on top of that… No, thank you. I don't want all my scroll positions on all my emails to be logged in their database forever.
I use Gmail with my own domain (you have to pay for the privilege but Google Workspace has been very reliable and flexible for my purposes)
I'd rather use Google's web storage than my own. I don't have the time nor the expertise to implement multi-region replication etc.
I understand that granting Google access to one's emails might be a dealbreaker for journalists, dissidents etc, though - so clearly Gmail is no good if you have legitimate need for PGP.
Expanding the acronym really works well here. Gmail is no good if you have a legitimate need for pretty good privacy.
I would argue everyone does, most people just don't really think about what they are giving away. And how many emails a day are you receiving that a daily or hourly incremental offside backup wouldn't give you almost all of the benefits of "multi region replication"?
I have two or three emails a month get through my spam filtering. I don't consider fixing that to be worth the price of letting the world's most notorious advertising company have access to my emails
Gmail uses stupid amounts of memory, and the web version on iOS is so terrible it's got to be deliberate. The key problem is that they override scroll behavior such that scrolling intents are often registered as clicks, then they reset scroll position on back, the combo of which makes it almost unusable if what you're doing involves scrolling your mail list at all.
They used to still offer "basic HTML" gmail, which was waaaaaay better all around and was the only way I used it on any platform, but they discontinued that some time back.
Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding.
For example:
> Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
They can't (because LCoE is a per-project or per-technology measure, not a grid-wide measure, for a start).
UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous.
(Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
> Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security
Source? First time I read this, might make sense. Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
> Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
I believe the argument being made here is "we need to overproduce corn in order to get food security; what can we do with the spare capacity in the good years given we're already eating too much?"
I don't know if this argument is correct, but I believe that's what's being claimed.
I just get tripped up when I see people disbelieve physics, especially laws that have been known for about 150 years!
The economics and energy balance is where I too am very skeptical, at least near term.
Quick back of envelope calculations gave me a payback time of about 10 years, so which is only a single order of magnitude off which can easily accumulate by lack of access to detailed plans.
I can not exclude they see something (or can charge themselves lower launch costs, etc.) that makes it entirely feasible, but also can't confirm its infeasible economically. For example I have no insight of what fraction of terrestrial datacenter establishment cost goes into various "frictions" like paying goverments and lawyers to gloss over all the details, paying permission taxes etc. I can see how space can become attractive in other ways.
Then again if you look at the energetic cost to do a training run, it seems MW facilities would suffice. So why do we read all the noise about restarting nuclear power plants or trying to secure new power plants strictly for AI? It certainly could make sense if governments are willing to throw top dollar at searching algorithmic / mathematical breakthroughs in cryptography. Even if the compute is overpriced, you could have a lot of LLM's reasoning in space to find the breakthroughs before strategic competitors do. Its a math and logic race unfolding before our eyes, and its getting next to no coverage.
That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box.
I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).
That didn't work for me. I had my email, documents, some software I used on Windows and files it created (think Photoshop and PSDs). I needed time to find out if I could find similar/equivalent software on Linux, set up new workflows for my work and stuff like that. So I had my primary machine still on Windows and used the secondary to see how all this would work. And then gradually moved all the software, data, and workflows to Linux, until I didn't have anything left that could only work on Windows (well, except games I guess).
As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.
Not really, the full report refuted this. Issue in Spain was much more nuanced. Mostly related to lax voltage controls and outdated and slow control mechanisms at the grid, high voltage net.