Well, I wouldn’t like AI in any communication client of mine. Perhaps if it’s local to my box I would like that, but this solution really seems cloud based, meaning one could have an AI crawling over one’s data, to do whatever it wants with it. And local solutions usually are not as “good” as the cloud ones for whatever reason (hardware availability, data, and so on):
for users on less powerful hardware, the development team has integrated NVIDIA’s confidential computing to keep any remote processing secure. Rest assured, those who prefer to skip AI services can continue using Thunderbird without these extras.
There’s still tuta, or even /e/ (now a days murena), which still seem safer privacy wise than this new thunderbird option.
I’m really hoping for a “librewolf” kind of fork oriented to privacy, and betterbird doesn’t offer anything like that. The phoenix project has a safer user config for both firefox and thunderbird, but that doesn’t get rid of components (well perhaps it could possibly turn them off, though to make sure they better get ripped at build time).
Does any one know if this new TB service would offer caldav and carddav services as well? I didn’t see anything on stalwart advertisement.
What do you mean by unstable? I don’t get what this means. Install? Perhaps choosing a graphical install if available for your distribution of choice. I’ve heard nice things about Mint (can’t tell, I’m using Artix, and Guix is in my plans).
That said, US or EU are not that different. Actually the EU is little by little deteriorating the data privacy it used to say it protected, but moreover, even if the data is kept in EU, what does it prevent US gov or corps to get access to the data? Did people forget about the 5 eyes, the extended ones (not sure how many, there were several extensions)? Did people forget that no matter the current differences, the EU and the US are allies (not just politically) any ways?
Linux (kernel) itself has already identified itself as a US org, since it complies with the US requirements and law, to the point of banning developers from countries the US doesn’t like to be cooperating with US orgs (whether gov or not).
So, focusing on country based software developers shouldn’t be the main motivation. Looking for free/libre software if possible, so that you get some freedoms of yours sort of intended to be protected through licenses, or if not available then open source, is what we should be looking for. On top of that, communication software should be e2ee, and if possible distributed or peer to peer, or at least decentralized, and so on. Also we tend to forget that the data kept in the cloud is no longer yours anymore, no matter the cloud, neither the country, and if in need to keep personal data on some cloud we should make sure it’s encrypted, but still the data keeps being the cloud owner hands, so having personal backups is important, and clouds usually don’t advertise what metadata they leak.
Having said that Fedora sounds OK to me while Ubuntu sounds too commercial to me and actually now a days looking for users to get packages from its own “app store”. Instead of the “country of origin” for a distro, perhaps more importantly it is to see what your needs are, for example do you prefer rolling release vs. stable releases? Do you prefer vanila kind of packages (as close to upstream as possible) or your fine with the distro making changes to the upstream software as that serves better your purposes? How user friendly the distro is? Though perhaps you’re out of options if the framework laptop requires firmware or patches not found upstream, then you might better stay with the “officially supported” distros, unless what you miss by not having such firmware or patches is something you can live with, but usually x86 laptops are “easily” used with gnu+linux on top, except for some drivers not fully working with your hardware or missing firmware, but people usually still uses those laptops with gnu+linux on top. For arm laptops (I believe framework has laptos with arm CPUs, and actually is offering some initial ones with risc-v cpus) that tends to be a little more involved and I personally have no experience with that, and actually I’m waiting for a cheap enough and not so low level risc-v laptop or mini-pc to start experimenting with it (not all distributions support arm and even less risc-v).
Again, I’ve heard nice things of Mint, particularly for people new to gnu+linux, and it’s not a rolling release distribution. Though I’m one of those thinking that rolling relase distributions are easy to live with, at least not on the server spectrum (there are actually servers running on top of rolling release distributions such as Arch, but that’s not the majority of them) given they can’t afford reboots (very few updates actually require reboot on gnu+linux, linux/kernel itself being one of those which better get a reboot ASAP but not necessarily immediately) or changes requiring a service to drop even for a little while. But with rolling releases one doesn’t have to deal with big differences between distribution major versions upgrades, and the changes requiring using intervention when upgrading packages are distributed on time, so no need to focus on a lot of them at once.
Just my two cents, :)