The existence of a way to get around the problem doesn’t mean the problem is solved. If a lot of people want to do this, then it should be easier to do and obvious how to do it

It’s not, but what distros frequently top the list of “user-friendly” distros?

Ubuntu, PopOS, Fedora, and friends.

Maybe it’s not how it should be, but that’s currently how it is.

I think it is unreasonable because a Windows user (i.e. myself) can quickly get up to speed with MacOS within five minutes without the need for external instruction. I can manage a MacOS system perfectly fine even without any prior knowledge of how it works. I can figure out how to configure the settings to do what I need it to do without needing to search for how to do it online.

GNOME took almost a week to get used to and remember where things are located, such as what is located in Settings, how the task flow works, and so forth. I never got used to the “disappearing dock”. I had to use an extension for that. GNOME is just way more different than the others. Meanwhile, my grandpa picked up Cinnamon as a lifelong Windows user within five minutes.

I love and use GNOME daily, but I think it’s still the case that the interface “needs some getting used to” for a Windows/MacOS user. The design paradigm is just not familiar or self-explanatory to anyone who has regularly used desktop computers in the past decade.

This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.

The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.

We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.

I used Thunderbird for a year but I don’t recommend it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a competent email client, but I’ve found that the lack of tray notifications is unbelievably annoying. That means you can’t really have it running headless in the background checking for emails. Birdtray is kind of a janky solution that I don’t recommend either.

Mailspring I’ve found has most of the features I’d need from a mail client. It also does have a real background process that can check for mail and notify you when you receive some.

The application with the best integration to your (GNOME) desktop is going to be GNOME Geary. It looks like a native GNOME app (because it is) and it fits in perfectly with your system. But it’s very light on features. If you only need a client to read and write simple messages, Geary will work wonderfully.

I think courts in the US are slowly coming to the consensus that AI-generated content is not eligible for copyright. My opinion is that this solves the problem rather perfectly; companies now have an incentive to use humans, because if they use AI to make content then anyone is free to rip off that content, and I think that’s the way it should be.

AI should benefit humanity, and its products should be open and available for everyone, rather than being something for corporations to exploit for their own sole benefit.