Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.

I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It’s certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don’t cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.

You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.

I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.

Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.

Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.

I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.

I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.

I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.

I thought people would learn how to use computers.

It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.

Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.

If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn’t want to accept middle-click to paste text where that’s an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.

KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.

I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.

Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.

Yes, I do know how old Blender is.

The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.

It’s a bar.

I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.

The post makes it sound like he has a bunch of automation he likely wrote himself on incoming mail, but he wants Google to do some messy parts (spam filtering, archiving, providing a nice client). Google has no reason to want to continue doing that for him and the handful of other people doing something similar.

He’s being a bit whiny here. He was having employees use Gmail as a client for his self-hosted POP mail, which is a niche use case that likely has a brittle implementation and doesn’t make any money for Google. Gmail offers a paid product for this kind of use case, but it won’t integrate with the rest of his (likely custom) automation. He wants to self-host parts of the system and have Google do the messy bits, but he’s not their customer and probably isn’t a very good product either.

He then complains that to self-host IMAP:

My server is now responsible for storing all of their messages, including all of their spam. It is a vast amount of data. I will have to implement quotas.

It’s 2025 and that’s a silly claim. A 12Tb HDD costs the same as a couple bottles of booze, and it’s not hard to write a script that clears out spam after 30 days. The other complaints are basically UX.

Normally saying a small business owner should self-host IMAP and write scripts would be a bit unreasonable, but this is JWZ.

That is a separate issue. This is a lock to prevent use with other service providers,