How digitally independent are you?
I don’t think Thunderbird is a direct alternative to Gmail. The best alternative is to own your own domain name and use your own email server, but that’s really impractical for most people. At the very least, owning your own domain name that you use for your email is way better than relying on a service that locks you in with their own domain name.
It’s not super easy to set that up, but it’s easier than most people probably think it is. A service with imap support will let you take all your old email with you if you switch providers.
My own email service, Port87, doesn’t have custom domain support or imap, but I’m working to add both of those features. Any service you use should have both of those if you want to be independent.
Just for the record, Immich is made by futo, an American organization.
You can self host it on your own hardware for free to keep your files being on American servers, but it IS an American product.
This isn’t to shit on futo or immich btw, immich is amazing software and futo is a great org headed by Louis Rossman, the spearhead of the American side of the right to repair movement.
Edit for clarity: I mention this because of the EU flag in the image, not because this specific post is calling it that away from American products.
Thunderbird is just a mail app, not a mail provider.
Gmail is a mail app, not only a mail provider ^^
While true in a technical sense, you’re gonna confuse everyone with this…
Why Linux Mint specifically, why not just Linux? Or if they want to pick a specific distro, why not Trisquel or another FSF-endorsed distro?
why not just Linux?
Choice paralysis is a real obstacle for casual users who don’t have specific needs (e.g. anti-proprietary values) and don’t want to know what a kernel or a binary blob is, we’ve even seen this with Lemmy and other Fediverse options. So giving a specific distro suggestion is effective for this, and then later enabling them to move to other distros if there’s one more suited to them.
Linux Mint is generally well-received by beginner users, especially those moving from Windows which is similar enough to Cinnamon. Even if it’s not the ideal distro, it’s one which I believe casual users are less likely to reject. Hardware is more likely to ‘just work’, including graphics cards and non-free codecs. Non-free software readily appears in the app store, which is important if users are still dependent on them (e.g. their hobby group only uses Discord). While I personally believe in, support and create FOSS software, I don’t see how FSF-endorsement is important to the target audience, and if it risks them complaining that their NVIDIA GPU is acting weird or they’re having trouble installing proprietary tools they need for work, then I’d compromise and give them the smoothest reasonably-free option possible and allow them to decide to move to another distro later when they’re more familiar with Linux and how easy it is to try out distros.
