Which was actually for me a pro argument of picking Proton. The EU has a growing need to monitor and spy on its citizens (see chat control madness). Switzerland is not perfect regarding online privacy, but even if Proton was hosted somewhere else, remember that they do encrypt (mostly) everything.
Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience.
M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
I agree with everything, just want to add a downside of proton which is often forgotten: there is no search. You cannot search your emails’ body (headers work, but keywords like “from:” still do not work for search), you cannot search the content of your files, etc.
It’s the price of end-to-end encryption.
The only workaround is synchronising everything locally and searching locally.
But you still can use Thunderbird for that. I recommend it no matter what mail provider is used. Web interfaces are so heavy nowadays, compared to that, Thunderbird feels so fast.
yes, so I can search my emails solely on my laptop if I install proton bridge and synchronize 50GB of emails. And in case you have ever tried to search 50GB of data with thunderbird, it’s slow.
I tried synchronising the data directly in the browser, without any email client and the search is mediocre and slow.
This is not a great experience for search.
But again, it’s not a critique of Proton, it’s just how it is with E2EE. At least it demonstrate they are really doing E2EE.
I still hope some time in the future homomorphic encryption will help, but I think we are at least a decade away from that.
This is a problem of encrypted storage in general (and hopefully homomorphic encryption will solve that), but I knew this and for me that is a feature, not a bug. I use 2-step password auth (NOT 2FA) explicitly so no one can read my emails without my consent - not the provider, nor the government.
To add to my own post what made me switch from M365 away in the first place besides the admin madness:
- No catch-all (yes, I use my own domain just for me, and I want a catchall to my mailbox)
- Outlook 365 webinterface becoming buggy and shitty in so many ways
- I had 2 domains set up (one private, one business) but O365 would not display which email a given was used as target (just display my name), nor would it let me choose FROM which Email I want send/reply to a mail
- O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so, but I always keep the webinterface open in my tab 24/7
Additionally, I had a Bitwarden paid subscription and looking for another VPN subscription, plus a commercial AI subscription. Proton is has all of that in a one-package deal.
I really tried migrating to Proton, but unfortunately I found their suite not really fit for purpose and I had to request a refund.
- No search in Mail. You can use Bridge to pull your emails into something else, but this means it's no longer secure, and not really feasible for a non-techy partner!
- No search in Drive
- 3 domain limit for Mail(???)
- Drive sucks. No previewing files, viewing photos etc. due to missing docs suite
- No proper shared folders in Drive
- Pass is woeful at autocomplete
- Pass Aliases are independent of logins, so you end up with double entries for everything
- You can't sync the calendar with native apps, and the calendar doesn't show birthdays
- No contact sync
- Pass doesn't support SSH
- VPN lets you split tunnel by app on PC, app AND IP on Android, IP on the chrome extension. Some let you include, others exlcude. How hard is it to just allow exclude/include for hostnames?
There's tonnes more that I'm missing that I can't think of from the top of my head, but it seems like Proton have stretched themselves very thinly. What I would consider a lot of basic features are missing. One look at their UserVoice community shows a lot of frustration
I think it's probably best to pay for individual services that focus on one area. I ended up with Fastmail, 1Password, and Windscribe for example.
Valid points. For me the no search is feature (due to everything being encrypted), not a bug. But this is an individual decision. I have a similar list after 2 years of using (and managing) my personal M365 subscription (Onedrive on macOS sucks, search on iOS is very slow, spotlight integration doesn't work etc.). I just wonder what you use now as an alternative, because it seems the perfect solution will not exist. For M365, they also just price hiked my subscription after one year to over 40% (and what would I do, migration takes day) and I just felt Microsoft holds me hostage. This is not solved in any way by moving to just another lock-in platform, but I trust proton more to value customers and not squeeze money out of me with that lock-in. At least I trust them more than Microsoft or Google.
Unfortunately we took the simple option and reverted back to Google. I was lucky that my wife even went along with my plan to migrate everything in the first place!
I'm considering self-hosting Immich to replace photos, but not sure when I'll tackle that and don't fancy having to use Tailscale all the time. No idea about a Drive replacement as yet!
I've had no issues with the app lately, but it's still missing the feature of building a local search index to do searches based on e-mail content, like the web client can do.
Too early to say that (I used the holidays for the transition). With your custom domains you have to make sure everything is setup properly on the DNS side (MX records, SPF, DKIM/DMARC etc.) but the proton ui has checks and makes that really easy, when correctly setup all checks are displayed "green". If you have trouble of your outgoing mails to be accepted (or land in spam), I would advice making sure all is marked green for you too.
MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly.
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
Absolutely screwed! Every single product they have - OS (dominant desktop and laptop OS by a wide margin), Azure - (gaining in second place, now 25% vs AWS 31%), M365 (also dominant, particularly in terms of revenue). None of these show any sign of going anywhere, and if anything, the numbers for cloud and M365 are trending up.
I could only wish my own business were this screwed.
Their success is a big part of why the experience is so bad as they have to appeal to a common denominator.
At the same time, they also win on the little things that diehard opponents choose to ignore, like search that kind of works. I don't like Office 365 but I'm a paying customer because, after long research, I haven't found a competitor that meets all my requirements.
WPS office + HarmonyOS will likely become dominant
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps
then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
> they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365)
You forgot Github, the once-reliable and once-generally-fast but now pink-unicorn-bedraggled slow-as-molasses 'forge' site. Oh how they messed it up and am I ever glad I only ever used it as a mirror for my own repos.
How they manage to screw up just about every product they purchase remains a mystery to me but by ${deity} are they good at it.
My personal pet-peeve everytime a "you don't need JS" post comes up on HN, is the disconnect between the interface designers and the developers. In my dayjob as a (mostly react) freelance contractor doing B2B and LoB apps, there are always UX designers coming up with the screen- and interface designs. I don't think any project I ever were, could have matched a screen design I was passed without JS. Whether it being business requirements (has to work in IE, or nowadays has to work in Edge), or simply hard visual design choices.
My favorite example is that of a date, date-time or date-range picker. Yes, there are HTML native elements. But they look absolutely ugly, styling only goes so far, and good luck with requirements such as "oh, but in the popup on the date-range picker, add a topbar with 3 buttons that trigger preselection and a dropdown". Now you can argue and communicate back that we save a lot of technical complexity in the stack if we stick to the HTML native solutions. But all those discussions basically end up managers and UX designers having no clue about the actual complexity and savings (time and money wise for future maintenance) and simply don't care.
And if I am the one telling them "Look, in the HTML native date-time picker, you can't add custom elements, you can't fully customize every bit and piece of behaviour so change the screen designs" they will just fire up random corporate website XYZ and show a similar version of what they have in mind (and it is always JS-based) and suddenly it looks like me being unable or unskilled to achieve something, that is clearly doable as others have done it.
Now not all is nice and shiny in the JS/React world. We use MaterialUI in a current project, and the commercial MUI-X DatePickers. They also come with their limitations, but it is just they are far more powerfull and customizable to actually meet the requirements and demands of UX and management, compared to the HTML versions.
> My dream would be that I can adb into my phone, install the .Net SDK or .Net Runtime (v 8 or 10) and have my applications run natively on Android
My understanding is that you can (almost) do that using MAUI (formerly known as Xamarin). You will not get a .Net SDK or Runtime, but the mono runtime. Since it is bundled in your app, you won't actually notice.
No, we need one level lower & zero mono. I want the sdk or runtime to be installed in the same way (and executable) the same way on android as on other linux distro's. .Net has ARM builds so it will work fine. This is without any specific framework dependencies (like aspnet, maui, avalonia etc) - just plain .net 8/10. It would actually be nice if android just bundled the runtime to begin with so we don't have to. They can just pin it to latest LTS versions and let it auto update now & then, same way as WebView/Google play services etc.
So for whatever reason you want the .NET runtime over Mono - not sure why that is a hard requirement, but AFAIK that is also the goal for microsoft. As in, merging those runtimes and have a single codebase that works for all platforms (including android). There are technical obstacles and historic codebases, but I would expect this unified runtime soon.
We must stop calling them social media and call them what they have become: media. The percentage of actually social stuff is negligible. Now you can classify having a conversation with a random stranger that you never going to meet in your life over twitter as "being social". I'd say you are just passing time or entertaining yourself. Or worse, compensating lack of real world social interactions.
> it was well known that Unity was hindered by sticking with an old and out-of-date Mono, and they were very successful at deflecting the blame
So much this. According to a 2023 blog article from Unity [0], Unity uses Boehm GC. But Mono itself introduced another, generational GC called SGen [1] more than 10 years ago that became the default at some point. It is just Unity stuck on old mono versions, missing out on all the changes and improvements that went into Mono after their fork, essentially.
A sibling comment [1] remarks that they play games with raw pointers that are incompatible with the newer GC, so it's not "just" an older runtime that's biting them in the ass.
well, it has a lot to do with people growing up during cold war and german reunification.
There were many stories where people lost faith in politics (e.g. after Chernobyl), so people gathered together to do stuff on their own. I think being "social" (to all people), decentralized and mistrusting authorities is just a left thing. so that's just a natural thing imho
That chernobyl and western politics is in any way connected is due to decades unscientific fearmongering. And Berlin has always been a hotbed for that.
It delays one RTT, so if you have seen seconds of delays that means your TCP ACK packages were received seconds later for whatever reason (high load?). Decreasing latency in that situation would WORSEN the situation.
I was testing some low-bandwidth voice chat code using two unloaded PCs sitting on the same desk. I nearly jumped out of my skin when "HELLO, HELLO?" came through a few seconds late, at high volume, after I had already concluded it wasn't working. After ruling out latency on the audio side, TCP_NODELAY solved the problem.
All respect to Animats, but whoever thought this should be the default behavior of TCP/IP had rocks in their head, and/or were solving a problem that had a better solution that they just didn't think of at the time.
Hard to say without looking at the complete setup - and probably just a side-effect of the underlying issue. The question is, why did you have such high RTTs? That already points to a different cause.
I would even argue that NODELAY for a VoIP solution makes no sense - why are you even using TCP instead of UDP in the first place?
Why is usage of AI even a discussion point? Steam also now enforces publishers to disclose if they used AI during game creation. It is a tool, and as a consumer I judge the end product. I don't care what tools were used in the production, just as I don't care if you use Photoshop, Pixelmator, Maya, 3DSMax or whatnot. The end result is what counts. And if the end result is full of bullshit AI slop and is not fun to play, don't give them an award. I played Claire Obscure and it is an absolut stunning and beautiful game.
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