I’m looking at mailbox.org when mine ends.

I don’t have a favorite source so any searching will give you various perspectives but here’s one I fully read that seems reasonably objective.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/

Essentially, they praised the Republican platform. Then they took it back and said we won’t share political comments that aren’t neutral. Then they shared some more pro-republican opinions. And then they again said “whoops our bad back to politically neutral comments.”

I personally think political neutrality is a coward’s position and most often used by the supporters of “The Empire” to hide their uniforms and obscure their salutes. I can understand when your company employs X people, it’s a highly public company, and your product is something as detached from politics as possible like - oh idk - a twitch streamer showing videogame footage or something entirely entertainment based. Even then, I still think neutrality is the garden which allows weeds to thrive.

But this is worse than that, this is pro-republican people who got excited their guy won and got vocally bold, got punished, and are now going into hiding. And their company isn’t an entertainment business, it’s one who’s product is intertwined with privacy and the digital/corporate landscape we live in today. Proton wouldn’t be doing as well as they are if a pro-worker party was in power for the last 50 years. They wouldn’t be as profitable if monopolies had been busted sooner and mergers denied. And this is only the tech related focus they’d like you to consider, which isn’t fair. If the KKK are burning crosses in the front lawns of your neighbors and lynching people, it’s a bit tone deaf to talk about how good their sponsored lunches are and it’s evil to walk around the town square praising them for their lawn care. There are more important things they’re responsible for than the things that benefit you. And that’s even if you believe they’re doing any good on this subject which I have not seen. Trump has approved historically massive mergers, republicans have removed people like Lina Khan who was actually doing good, and introduced people who have publicly said they want less scrutiny on business - while deregulating corporations and defanging the agencies responsible for holding corporations accountable.

I haven’t seen, read, or heard any reasonable defense of any of these points and I think more people should be aware. We all make deals with the Empire at times, I’m not here to shame the workers, but if you’re like me who wanted to move their email from Empire to something Rebel than you might as well know that Proton is not the best alternative you could choose.

I’m currently looking at mailbox.org as an alternative.

Ya, happy to spread the word! I was hesitant for a long while for the same reason but then Steam Deck happened and I looked into it more and BAM here we are. It’s one of the more hopeful changes in this tech landscape - the growth of open source and/or free software that’s often equivalent to the paid software.

But you are, you’re defending the line “Republicans are for the working class and Democrats are for Big corporations.” That’s your stance. I’m saying Trump got put in office by not one billionaire but by dozens. He was funded by big corporations and his actions show him supporting them. In his first term he gave a massive tax cut to corporations and the rich and he raised taxes on the working class (disguised as a temporary decrease in taxes while he was in office). You’re literally saying wall street was okay with RvW being repealed, an anti-humanist action done by Republicans, as long as they got tax cuts, an anti-worker action done by Republicans. Republicans did two bad things you can recognize that go against your central argument you’re defending “Republicans are for the working class and Democrats are for Big corporations.”

When the trump administration successfully does something Anti-Trust related and the American people benefit THEN I will say “wow look at that, one good thing they did.” Until then I’m gonna focus on the fact that they’re generally and overwhelmingly NOT doing good things. Including but not limited to pro-corporation anti-humanist anti-worker actions like deregulation, disrupting oversight, allowing massive monopolistic mergers, going against unions (except for police unions it seems) and taxing the working class more while giving slush fund money to their corporate donors. All the while they’re locking up judges and US citizens and immigrants without due process.

I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a bad progressive and I’ll happily join hands with you in making good policy changes but I will call out what I think to be bullshit that hurts the cause because we need to have a united front against the billionaire class and they win by creating wedges and one liners that are plausible and divisive. Like “Republicans are pro-worker and Democrats are for Big business” which is at best reductive and misleading and at worst fucking obviously stupid, wrong, and dangerous.

Just one of the sources detailing some of the billionaires that funded his return: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leokamin/2024/08/14/here-are-trumps-top-billionaire-donors/

Privacy focused company praising a political party jailing opposition and citizens without due process, ignoring the rule of law, and generally grabbing power to maintain complete control.

Speaking as someone who currently has a proton account, I was super disappointed. Thought I was leaving Google for the Rebellion, then I found out Proton was happy the Death Star’s construction was underway and doesn’t understand why the dissolution of the Galactic Senate is a bad thing. I’ll be leaving when my subscription expires.

Ya, nah this is some bullshit. You’re actively defending Trump and Republicans even if you’re pretending you don’t like Trump or his policies.

Republicans are definitively not the party for “the little guys”. That’s demonstrably false, Republicans are consistently the party working against progress in most fields but especially worker protections, wealth inequality, and competitive regulated business. I agree Dems have big business backing as well, that they have some corrupt ties going against their constituents interests but the fact remains that applies to nearly all republicans. That only applies to some to most of Democrats. There is no Bernie Sanders in the Republicans, there is no AoC in the Republicans, hell there’s barely anyone of color or who isn’t a male - like Republicans are entirely private sector goons. To equate the Republican and Democrat partys is to fundamentally misunderstand the political climate of the US.

Lina Khan was the FTC chair appointed by Biden and she’s been lauded as a fantastic agent for Anti-Trust and consumer protection reasons. Andrew Ferguson was appointed by Trump and although his track record doesn’t seem to be the worst he’s said he wants to ease scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions (so the opposite of Anti-Trust) while “continuing critical oversight over big tech”. To me this is a clear demonstration that Republicans are in bed with big corporations and Democrats were working with what tools they had to break up big businesses. To me, this should be an obvious concept to anyone who says they pay attention to the political happenings of the US.

Big tech paid into Trump’s campaign, famously, and there has been no indication that the billionaires behind Trump’s reelection are doing worse off for themselves. The US is now further away from having laws similar to the EU’s consumer protection laws and it is directly thanks to Republicans being corrupt. Are some Democrats corrupt in the same way? yes. Do I think voting Democrat will fix the country? No. But I’d argue day and night that if Democrats won every race in the country, worker wages would go up, standard of living would go up, crime would go down, wealth inequality would slow down or shrink, and the country would be in a better place because unlike the obstructionist Republicans enough Democrats care about their constituents that positive change would happen.

I know you’re getting a ton of replies already, but I switched to Arch Linux two months back or so and I just want to say nearly every game I’ve tried works great out of the box, a handful of games required me to go to my steam settings a flip a switch or copy and paste something from protondb, and no games have failed to work.

Gaming on Linux is so good that you end up flipping one switch in steam and get nearly perfect performance (with most games running identically or better than they did on Windows for me). It’s been such a surprise, I just played the Arc Raiders technical Alpha and I thought for sure Linux would fail me then. And it did. For the first day, then on the second day they patched proton and the game and I played all week and weekend with zero issues. It was fantastic!

I would highly encourage any gamer who’s thinking about switching to Linux but worried their games won’t work to not worry as much. Check protondb for your favorites, but you can safely assume most game work out of the box.

I don’t feel like the purpose of this movement is to punish FOSS software providers simply because they are based in the US.

Ente is a FOSS provider that does good work as far as I can tell. In my opinion, they should be supported and grouped together with the “good guys” category (as of today and right now, excluding any future bootlicking tweets their CEO may post).

There’s an argument that this group is truly focused only one European alternatives, but I believe in the absence of one (and personally when there only bad/significantly-worse alternatives) some non-EU companies should be listed and supported.