I felt grateful that I had to go to class every day in such a lovely building (which still stands, btw, albeit with some additions and modifications). Having the opportunity to be there was, and still is, one of the highlights of my life.

Claws-mail (https://claws-mail.org) has a good working Windows version. Native desktop app, lightweight, extremely fast, able to handle multigigabyte inboxes for breakfast. The only drawback for some would be that it does not compose (although it can display them just fine) HTML mail, only text-only mail. This is an architectural decision.

Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.

Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.

This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.

Claws-mail has all my email for over 15 years. My inbox is several gigabytes in size, which claws handles flawlessly. And the software is continuously maintained. I'm using version 4.4.0 now, which was released 16 days ago on March 9.

So... yes.

You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.

I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.

https://github.com/tramhao/termusic

The not so good parts are 1) it is written in Rust and therefore packaging is awful with a lot of dependencies; 2) it repeats playlists by default with no option (so far) to turn that off. But there's an issue open on it and it looks like this is going to be fixed.

Their website: https://www.bruderhof.com

You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS.

That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.

However, the purported reimplementations did not usurp the names of the reimplemented product. Reimplement chardet using AI and insisting in calling the product the same as old chardet with a new version number and a new license is, I think, not exactly honest. At least he should have used something like "chardet-ng", "chardet-fresh", or whatever, and a completely different source tree.

On the scholarly front, the use of BibLaTeX is a significant step forward re: BibTeX.

If you're stuck on something LaTeX related, remember there's the latest edition to The LaTex Companion. It even has an appendix explaining the (in)famously cryptic LaTeX/TeX error messages:

https://latex-project.org/help/books/

There's also, among other resources, the great LaTeX Font Catalogue: https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/

Enjoy the new release!