A lot of FOSS solutions have funny names, mascots, etc. I’m surprised if IT/tech workers aren’t used to it. Just politely tell them, yes, it has slightly silly branding, but look past it and it’s software that does what you want.

Exactly. What happened to “restriction of what a user can do with software or its source code is an infringement upon the users’ rights”? I’m not saying that AI companies are acting in the spirit of FOSS, they’re not, their models aren’t even open-weight (for the most part), but the issue is not the training on materials that ought to be public domain anyway. There’s plenty of ethical issues with modern technology. It’s not sustainable at all, the supply chain is full of slavery, it generates huge amounts of emissions, etc. People’s primary concern being pearl clutching about “plagiarism” shows where their priorities lie. If AI companies have plagiarised then I couldn’t care less. It’s everything else they’re doing that’s the problem.

Yes, it can be a bit involved. I’d say I can spin up a mail server in 1–2 days though provided the OS is already installed and I have a domain name and port 25 isn’t blocked (that’s the main one that tends to be blocked). It may take longer for people who aren’t familiar with mail servers but it’s not some huge operation.

You can just try spinning up a mail server for fun. If it goes badly then just don’t move over your dentist appointments to it. It’s only critical infra if you use it for critical things, which you probably shouldn’t till it’s stable.

I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I’ve not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.

I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I’ve not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It’s also a fun learning experience.

I like rnote. It’s not super feature-complete, but it’s still really nice to use. Has an infinite canvas to write on, pretty clean UI/UX, has no problems taking my wacom tablet as input.

That’s where multi factor authentication comes in. Biometrics are something that you are. You also need something that you know.

I don’t particularly care in the abstract but this particular piece of software is also technically awful vibecoded slop. And DHH isn’t a random nazi, but a nazi with a platform provided by the popularity of his slopware.

yovday

Looks nice though, and it’s cool how well Linux works for touchscreens these days.

Ubuntu was my first Linux distro and I liked it back then. I would’ve recommended the old Ubuntu to non-tech-savvy people, or people who want a Linux that “just works” (although back then no Linux “just worked”, there was always at least a bit of debugging for me). However it’s enshittified a lot. A lot of basic software is only available as snaps. It generally feels quite corporate these days.

Seconding Niri, but also I’ve seen swayfx setups that have Hyprland-like aesthetics.

If you don’t care about fancy effects, I’ve been a river user for years and I like it. Nowadays it is just a compositor and the WM is separate, but river-classic (which includes a WM) has a dwm-like tag system, is programmatically configured (ie you speak to the river IPC in any language of your choosing—by default it’s a shell script but the WM just executes ~/.config/river/init on startup, so that file can be any executable), and is simple and lightweight. The new 0.4.x release separates the compositor and WM, so you can pick or write your own WM that suits your own workflow/use-case, if that’s your thing—it might not be if you don’t want customisability and you just want something that makes the decisions for you to a good enough standard.

I don’t know about Nazi specifically, but people often use Nazi to mean fascist in general. And he is definitely far-right. I would prefer that foss remain hostile to fascists.

Converting a GPL codebase to another language creates a derivative work which, by the terms of the GPL, must be GPL-licensed.

Julia Evans has a bunch of these really handy cheatsheets. I have several saved that I reference semi-regularly.

Yes, I’m not an IT professional and don’t have education in anything related to computers. Has always been a hobby for me. I don’t want to do my hobbies for work because I fear it would take the fun out.

I use Zathura. Not really meant to be an epub reader (ie missing ways to change the font)—afaik it just converts it to a pdf then displays the epub using the pdf engine. But it works fine for my purposes and means I can use my preferred pdf reader for epubs too.

Copying from a reply to another comment:

I picked OpenBSD over other non-Linuxes because of its focus on security. Also I think the pufferfish is cute. It wasn’t that deep of a decision for that particular laptop. I do find it quite an enjoyable OS to use, and I have anecdotally had fewer problems with it than with Linuxes, I suspect because their whole security focus also means fewer bugs.

If you’re interested in it, just try it out in a VM.

I didn’t—I like to pick up old second-hand laptops that are selling for cheap and tinker with them (install different OSes, coreboot them, etc). One of the machines I regularly use is OpenBSD, but it’s not my sole OS. My gaming machine is Linux—afaik you’re gonna have a tough time trying to play AAA games on any other (FOSS) OS, but I’ve not tried, because the laptop I run OpenBSD on is an old underpowered Thinkpad anyway.

I picked OpenBSD over other non-Linuxes because of its focus on security. Also I think the pufferfish is cute. It wasn’t that deep of a decision for that particular laptop. I do find it quite an enjoyable OS to use, and I have anecdotally had fewer problems with it than with Linuxes, I suspect because their whole security focus also means fewer bugs.

As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.

Do you mean to don’t write some message to root@xolat.games? 🤔

You can, but most email servers redirect mail to root@xolat.games to some other user eg xolatgames@xolat.games. The root user usually does not have their own inbox.

I’m not sure why hello is trying to write to /home/root then, that’s your problem. Do you have any Postfix aliases set up? Check /etc/postfix/aliases (there’s a chance it’s in a different location; the output of postconf alias_maps will tell you where it is).

But what’s the configs do you need? 🤔 Dovecot has about 20 separated configuration files! Do I will need to put each of them?

Just post the output of doveconf -n. Redact any sensitive info.

Just reading the first logs you pasted, it tells you the answer there. You can’t receive emails because you’re trying to receive emails as root, and writing emails to the home directory. Dovecot doesn’t run as root so it can’t write to root’s home directory.

You would ordinarily not receive mail as root. Most people set up root to redirect to your actual user. Look into Postfix aliases.

Try emailing a non-root user. It should write to the inbox. I mean, without your Dovecot configs, I can’t tell if there’s anything else wrong with them, but from the errors it seems Dovecot would work if not for the permissions errors.