- cross-posted to:
- demicrosoft@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- demicrosoft@programming.dev
Can someone suggest me good alternatives to both Microsoft’s mailing system (Outlook, etc.), and to Github, just in case?
Self hosting email is HARD if you aren’t an expert but I figured it out. It took a while to get it stable and usable but man it has felt so good being in control of my email. Worth the effort. I use mailu, which is docker based. Works great.
Id argue it hard to set up, we not hard just lots of interconnecting pieces, but once you are going it’s very easy to maintain. I just set up an email server from scratch in a about a day.
That’s fair, I definitely took longer than that but I’m far from experienced in all this. Still, it was worth the effort in the end.
For Outlook as an E-Mail client: I like Claws-Mail or just standard Thunderbird.
For Outlook as an E-Mail Service: Either Self-Host or find a good provider (I have a small German company where I pay 1€/month and get great service)
As an GitHub alternative, I use sourcehut. The link is sr.ht btw
I use Codeberg.
Edit: fixed the link.
Link errors out when I try to open it
They’re annoyingly only allowing open source repos and active forks etc…
Who in their right mind uses hotmail?
Same kinds of people who still pay for AOL.
Relying on American companies is a liability in of itself.
While there is corruption everywhere and on a standardized basis, there are of course countries with higher levels of corruption, the US is the #1 source of corruption and criminality in the world. Additionally it’s the ideological centre for global oligarch/criminal gangs.
Microsoft’s monopoly in Windows and Office alone results in extraction of hundreds of billions of dollars from companies and individuals all around the world.
I am a newbie in LibreOffice, but I am wondering whether me chronicling my first experiences in it would be worth doing.
I think what we sorely lack is more people like Nick and Michael Horn making approachable tech news about this niche.
I understand that to some the idea itself of the tech news cycle, focused on its own navel all the time is not appealing, but I think that is exactly there that a channel like this could distinguish itself, showcasing OSS solutions having an impact on the public good, something the usual news outlets cannot afford to do since every second is lost revenue.
The only risk is being boring.
I think it would be worthwhile, and probably help some people.
We really need some consumer protections around emails.
Imagine if your landlord could just intercept your mail on the same way.
It’s part of our identities.
We’re living in the Wild-West of the internet
While I agree with your point, this is more like signing a rental agreement allowing your landlord to enter your apartment unannounced and without you being present, and then crying about it when they do exactly that. I wouldn’t use hotmail as a throwaway account, let alone to develop the main Foss competitor of office.
Microsoft + GitHub = if you’re using it still W T F are you thinking!!!
Cries in NixOS
Removed by mod
This tells me LibreOffice has become a threat to Microsoft, and I’m here for it.
If anyone else is curious what it’s like, LibreOffice’s site is here. Highly recommend.
It tells me microsoft is petty
They literally blew billions of dollars and years of developer time just to screw the companies that won the argument of “open internet or Microsoft protocol” back in the day. Yes, petty.
Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.
What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)
It’s not even that. It’s way smaller potatoes down in the org chart.
People always say “why would large company do this” and the answer is almost always that guy 7 or 8 rows down the org chart needs this to get their bonus this year and that point gets distilled into 1 bullet in a power point presentation that is summarized by chatgpt.
I visited a local Microsoft office in the mid-90s. Their office employee kitchen had a poster of the Internet Explorer logo smashing the Netscape logo to a bloody pulp.
I worked for apple
It was creepy. I have been in litteral sex-cults that felt less cultish and close-minded.
I got recruited by Apple some years ago because of my Stack Overflow account. I’m glad I ignored them, although there’s something to be said for an ungodly salary and Apple stock options.
If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?
Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.
So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.
So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.
So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.
Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.
I have plenty of thoughts about their majority shareholders.
Its just none of those thoughts are positive.
Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/
using Microsoft Word for too long makes me break out in Tourette’s
Writer is so much more understandable
I don’t think anything in the software world has ever pissed me off as much as the fucking ribbon. “We’ve run out of ideas as far as the UI is concerned - just throw everything up there somewhere, menus, toolbars, whatever”. A close second was their genius idea of hiding unused menu items so the locations of the items you do use are constantly changing.
I don’t use MS products any more but my 90 yo parents do and it’s a fucking nightmare trying to help them with stuff. MS Office is certifiable elder abuse.
Office 97 was the last good Office. No auto-adjusting menus, no ribbons, you could actually provide phone support and have confidence that both people were seeing the same thing.
Word is proof that there is no God and that we’re all alone in the cold vacuum of space. Word is every traffic light being red. Word is getting an itchy arsehole because you couldn’t quite wipe yourself properly.
Old news.
EU should really create rule to use only EU FOSS tech for goverment services. For all member states.
What was a LibreOffice developer doing using Microsoft stuff in the first place?
If you use Microsoft or Meta or any of the usual suspects, and they screw up or get hacked or behave badly, don’t be all surprised and complain. It’s what they do, and they don’t care, and never listen. You know this.
This isn’t a conspiracy…
It’s the reality of using Hotmail as a business account in 2025.
Which is frankly nuts.
But the author even says the same thing happened to them before too
Yep, I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but in these situations, I assume incompetence before I assume evil intent.
Maybe it is intentional but the incompetence is in how obvious they are.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetentance
Is the saying, but it’s definitely not always true.
It’s more like some of the best evil can be hidden behind incompetence for quite a while
I mean, the phrase is for associates and random people you run into for one specific interaction
Basically:
Give em the benefit of doubt
It doesn’t mean if your neighbor kicks you in the balls everyone morning, you still try to shake his hand tomorrow.
95% of senior government officials across Africa will give you a fancy-ass, taxpayer funded, full color laminated plastic business card that lists their email address for official business as Gmail or Hotmail.
Like… Today. Right now. I used to have a collection. Once got one with a 3D hologram thing. Fucking hotmail and gmail address.
Using Hotmail for anything was already a bad idea, using it for an open-source dev account is worse. I don’t understand why they haven’t switched to something else 20 years ago.
It’s been a 365 account for years now. They just still use the domain.
What, Microsoft? The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them? Microsoft the convicted monopoly?
Noooooo! It can’t be! They’re so . . . uh . . . ubiquitous.
The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them?
Ironically enough, their biggest failure to do this was when they let the iPhone (with the help of Android) bitch-slap Windows Mobile and Windows Phone out of existence.
Classic Monkeyballmer
Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.
Even if you stay on GitHub, definitely mirror to another host. Git is designed to be distributed, why not make use of that capability!
I host my main repository on my “lab server” at home, I got a copy on codeberg, and my public repo are mirrored on github.
I specify in the github description that’s a mirror with a link to codeberg.
Github is the little outcast kid of the bunch…
Oh man, I hate the whole git system so much, it was like the worst part of coding.
Or self-host if that’s feasible, MAS has been self-hosting for a while now, for example.
Self-hosted GitLab is what GNOME and Debian chose to do.
I still use the main GitLab for most things.
https://repo.or.cz/ provides just git hosting.
It’s also relatively easy to just self-host Git, though permissions can be wonky, at least last time I tried.
I can’t recommend Darcs. Luckily I don’t see MS (or any other corp) being able to take over core Git development. I really should try Pijul again, but least time I played with it, the history/branch visualization (which you can do without, but I really like to have) was actually still worse than Darcs.
They probably meant purely self hosted. You can self hosted Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab, and probably many others.
git (by itself) is no harder to host than SSH.
I wouldn’t say it is particularly easy to setup, not easier than using a Docker image at least.
Gitea (and hopefully Forgejo as well) really is.
I can vouch for Forgejo, it is pretty easy.
codeberg is owned by a nonprofit. highly recommend it
Well now i know Linux is ready to switch over to.
Thanks Microsoft!


















