People use computers to accplish tasks. That requires running software on an OS, but nobody runs software or an OS just to sit & watch it exist. They run it to accomplish tasks.
Different distros mostly vary in how easy it is to accomplish various tasks. No one distro is the easiest for everything, so people make different choices depending on their needs.
Part of the problem extended beyond software. Back when I got into recording, FireWire was necessary for the data bandwidth and it was standard on Macs. I had to install a card to work with my recording interface on Windows.
On a side note, been using Reaper for years and it has been great as a hobbyist option. I understand why any professional would use something like ProTools instead, though.
I personally like the fact that u-he, acmt and audio damage provide their plugins on linux. I know, not FOSS, but game changing when it comes to switching music production over to linux. Vital is also available on linux, as is bitwig as host.
What I do is use Claws Mail with POP3, it has an option that allows a message to only be deleted from the server after a configurable period of time. So if you set it for 10 days for example the message will exist both locally on your PC and on the server for 10 days, after which it will only exist on the PC.
It works pretty well in general. The only account giving me some trouble is Yahoo, which I suspect has some quirks, which occasionally cause the messages to be downloaded again and duplicated. Thankfully it’s easily fixed because Claws also has a feature to delete duplicates.
This approach is different from IMAP, which would maintain a local offline cache of the live inbox, but you wouldn’t be able to only keep local messages — any change in one side would be reflected in both.
However, Claws allows you to do both. You can have both a POP3 and an IMAP account connected to the same live box use the POP3 for offline archival, and the IMAP for when you want to put something back on the server, or if you need to look at other folders on the server besides inbox (POP3 cab only see the inbox, not trash, sent etc.)
Normally I only do folders locally on the PC, on the mailbox connected with POP3, so none of the organization is reflected on the live mailbox, which is inbox only. Every once in a while I connect via IMAP to recover emails from the sent folder, which I’ve sent with webmail or from mobile (using IMAP on mobile too).
If this doesn’t fit your workflow turn there are lots of IMAP syncing tools like you’ve noticed. IMAPsync is pretty good.
The last step for my workflow would be to self host an IMAP server that will index the POP3 mailbox, and expose it read-only (without SMTP) through a webmail app, for archival and search only. I may have to look at Piler. The quirk here is that the Claws mailbox format is slightly different from IMAP, it’s very similar to mbox but not identical, will have to see if any IMAP server will accept it.
Thunderbird is no go unfortunately, its main box format is to keep all messages on one big file instead of individual files, which complicates things a lot.
Using un*x since the 90s, this is all I know. I like awk but it can go fucking complicated, I once maintain a 5000 lines script that was parsing csv to generate JavaScript…
Someone used the wrong tool for the job. If an awk script gets more than a few dozen lines, it’s time to use another language/tool to process that data.
At that point I'd be looking for languages that have libraries that do what I need. Both Python and Perl have online repositories full of pre-written things. Some that can read CSV and others that can spit out JSON. It's then a matter of bolting things together, which, hopefully, is a few lines of code rather than 5000.
There are even awk repositories, but I'm not sure there's a central, official one like PyPI or CPAN.
In most cases extended POSIX regexes are enough and looks the same as perl regexes.
I also used perl until I needed to write highly portable scripts that can be run on systems without perl interpreter (e.g. some minimal linux containers). Simple things are also simple to do with grep/sed/awk, more complex things can be done with awk but require a longer code in comparison with perl.
Systems with bash but without standard POSIX utils? I know some without bash (freebsd by default, busybox based distros etc.) and with grep, sed and awk, but not vice versa.
I use dash to dock but I keep it hidden and make it the same size. It’s just nice to be able to go down to click open apps sometimes. I still rarely use it but it’s nice to have
Wayland xdg-shell Protocol is tailored only for GNOME needs.
What why is this a problem at all? For what’s worth GNOME is the only actually half designed and half usable thing out there. Yes they could add desktop icons and drop the “go into activities after boot” bullshit but how well, they’ve 1M€ in funding to reinvent the DE in all the unnecessary ways possible.
(And this comment is how you offend both the GNOME fans and haters at the same time. Probably also anyone else who cares about having alternatives.)
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