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.

There is actually a current Chromium-based browser for Android with Manifest v2 extension support and uBlock Origin.

Waterfox is available for Android.

I imagine you could wire your own mechanical switch to that steering wheel. Fuck them for doing that though.

Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.

I have a five year old Pixel 4A running LineageOS. I limit battery charge with AccA to ensure it doesn’t wear out.

The phone reports its battery capacity at 93%. I have no plans to replace it unless I break it,

It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.

I’m pretty happy with my P14s (essentially a T14). It’s even worse in that all the RAM is soldered, but as I understand things, AMD had legitimate performance reasons for doing so, and the trend is likely to continue.

IBM did the same thing 25 years ago on the Thinkpad 600 series.

KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn’t have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.

The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

I’m not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.