XSF Discussion - 2022-01-05

Link Mauve, Some parts of that remain, like being able to use both '\' and '/' as directory separators in most places (and APIs). But yeah, it was a parallel layer to Win32, so very difficult to use in practice alongside, but it worked perfectly well for very simple programs.

Link Mauve, I mean, WSL2 and ASL are entirely distinct VMs, so I'm not sure they're better from the integration perspective than the old POSIX layer, which was more like WSL1 but much worse.

dwd, what is ASL? This is the first time I hear about this.

dwd, at XDC last year, Microsoft did a few presentations of their current work, on their d3d12 Mesa backend (to get a proper OpenGL and OpenCL drivers on all current Windows platforms), on their Weston integration with RDP, on their almost-but-not-quite-DRM driver infrastructure for Linux…

Almost all of it has the goal of integrating WSL2 properly and transparently in Windows.

Possibly could be used with another VM, but they are doing and testing the integration there.

ASL is the Android Subsystem for Windows. Same tech stack as WSL2. Released in the US only, so far, on public preview builds of Windows 11. Probably get some stick for saying this here, but I'm really looking forward to it for my laptop. :-)

So all the WSL2 OpenGL integration will also get used by the ASL work. Or indeed vice-versa.

Woah, so Microsoft can actually make names which don’t start with Windows!!!

I don’t use Windows, so none of that has any use to me, but it’s nice that it exists.

Vastly offtopic, but I'm finding I can do almost everything on Windows these days day to day without resorting to another OS, with WSL2. The exception is dealing with mail, as there doesn't seem to be a single decent modern mail client for Windows.

Ah, I have good solid X11 with WSL2, so that's sorted too...

I'm not aware of a decent one for Linux either, suggestions welcome.

Apple's mail is the only desktop mail client I've found that works sensibly for me.

Polymer. :-) (Seriously, even I don't run that anymore).

Kev: What is your definition of a modern mail client?

I hear the opposite from outlook users who find there is no modern mail client on Linux. 😂

Ah, Apple.

I think like most things, the important criteria is "It's what I'm used to".

No idea how their mail client looks/behaves.

Hmmm. Can't be called ASL, can it. WSA? I don't know anymore.

I don't *think* I ask for much. * A sensible thread view that shows the message contents sequentially across mailboxes. * An 'archive' function that only moves those messages in the current thread in the current mailbox to the archive (i.e. doesn't move all of my sent messages to archive like EM Client does) * Can connect to Isode's IMAP server (I tried one client that looked promising but seemed to fudge the SASL exchange). * Can render Atlassian suite's HTML mails reasonably * Can do reasonable >-based replies * Can search across the local cache of mailboxes going back years moderately quickly That might be it. EM Client is really close, TBH, but the archiving behaviour is infuriating, and its HTML rendering isn't quite right.

Aside from Isode and Atlassian which I can’t test, I think mutt (with elinks for HTML rendering) fits all of these requirements.

It’s the client I’ve been using for close to 15 years, wow time sure flies.

Kev, Have you talked to the eMClient people? It's been years since I met them, but Filip and co seemed very approachable.

Link Mauve: Oh, does it? Back when I used it as my main client (which I did for years) I didn't think it could do message rendering in a thread view, and the HTML rendering had to be external to the main view.

dwd: No, it hadn't occurred to me they'd be interested in my feature request.

GOK why.

Oh, I missed this part; no it only renders the sender/subject/any metadata you like, not the message.

I often get emails which are long, which would easily take more than one screen to display, is that pleasant to use in your current client?

Or maybe it only displays a small part of the message?

Not sure I understand the question. Apple's stuff collapses long replies and seems to 'just get it right' for me. Let's see if I can screenshot somewhere.

https://prnt.sc/2644co0 that sort of thing

Oh, so like Google whatwastheirname mailing lists?

I don't recall, but it just seems to get it right.

I’d really miss the tree-representation of threads with such a UI, but if they were collapsable and “indented” after the message they reply to it might be usable.

It has a thread list as well, which you can expand (although it linearises the history, rather than being a tree, within a thread)

XEP-0045's concept of roles is different from affiliations in that roles are temporary, session-specific, except when they aren't? > An implementation MAY persist roles across visits and SHOULD do so for moderated rooms