dazo

@Rookwood @testeronious

Tuta seems to be driven by idealists and privacy activists as well. AFAIK, they also don't have venture capital and their user base of paying users is what keeps them alive. Which is also why it's still a small company.

I don't recall how Tuta got their initial funding to get startet. I don't think they were crowdfunded in the same way Proton did.

But the idealsism goals of both Tuta and Proton is what generally makes it less likely they will sell out.

AFAIR, Skiff was VC funded. The idealism of the founders are easily ignored when the VC backing wants to cash in on their investments. And that's what happened here, in some way or another.

@case2tv @Nelizea

Proton and Tuta has similar challenges most others don't care about (including FastMail) - End to End Encryption. That itself is a pretty hard nut to crack. FastMail and similar services don't need to think about that, which makes their services simpler.

I would also not claim that Tuta has a quicker development cycle. They had a round recently where more features were highlighted. But that's an exception. I've had a Tuta account for years as well, to test it out, and both the webmail and Android app is still not that feature rich.

And Proton delivers new features and updated apps quite regularly now compared to just a few years ago. Can it be better? Yes, of course. But still, they are doing alot than just 2-3 years ago. And 2-3 years was even better than the years before that.

Also consider that Proton delivers on a broad range of products and services. Mail, Calendar, Drive, Pass and VPN. Tuta basically has Mail and Calendar, where both of these Tuta services being fairly reduced in features still.

My experience (mostly using Mail and a little bit Drive these days) is that Protons releaes are also pretty solid. It's extremely seldom I'm hit by bugs these days. To have that kind of quality requires quite some QA efforts. I'm not claiming the other services are equally good, but Mail and Drive is now very stable - and Mail is especially crucial for my 15-20+ users abd myself.

Finally, Proton serves more than 100 million users by now. Tuta has reached a bit over 10 million, IIRC. That requires Proton to have more staff on support and operations tasks. So even if Proton has more than 400 employees, that's not 400 developers.

@unruhe @Nelizea @nailoC5

Can you elaborate more on how other distributions deviate and what the "invent" on their own?

@Nelizea @nailoC5

I need to look at that video (thx for the time marker). So my comment may miss his point.

If Linux is so hard, I wonder how Tresorit manages it quite nicely across multiple distros. They use fuse to mount the remote repository.

And the file attributes on files/dirs have a standardised API via libc and kernel syscalls. This is needed for the sync capabilities, to have data locally and in Drive. These APIs are identical across all distributions and are file system agnostic. Otherwise the tar command would have had a really hard challenge to be so widely useful for both file distribution as well as backups.

But I'll catch up on the video later.

@nailoC5

Where and when?

@case2tv @unruhe @Tutanota @protonprivacy

A while ago, I summarised my mailbox.org impression ... https://infosec.exchange/@dazo/111453908525787194

TL;DR ... Proton is way ahead of most competitors in overall user experience and ease of use, and yet providing a pretty good feature set.

@unruhe @protonprivacy

I thought a bit more on these complaints since this post. And I realised these complaints can also be ignored by applying some basic mathematics and common sense.

Proton has more than 100 million users by now. So let's say 100 million in this example. How many public complaints would it need to be from these users to really "catch fire"? Meaning - how often do you read about complaints and from how many users? More than 100.000 users? Okay. Let's say there are 1 million dissatisfied users.

If half of that million users complained loudly on the Internet, I would say that would probably be quite noticeable. Media would most likely pick it up, and it would brew up to media storm right?

Have you noticed anything like that? Do you see that many users complaining?

And if yes, that would still only represent 0.5% of the whole user base of Proton. If you include the other half complaining "silently", it would represent 1% of the Proton users.

That still leaves 99% users which are at least to some degree satisfied with Proton.

Even if you pull it up to 20 million dissatisfied users, they would still be in the minority compared to users finding Proton's services being just fine. And 20 million dissatisfied users - that would definitely have caused some media traction, don't you think?

@amju_wolf

They could even have a Fedora Copr repo, where they push out the updated .spec file and get a proper package build for all Fedora, RHEL/CentOS and more distros. With proper RPM packaging and repository. Push a new build and all users gets an updated package at their next update cycle.

That's a reasonable path to get started with preparing packages to become part of the native yum/dnf repos at least. And that across a lot of distributions and releases in a single go.

@LunchEnjoyer

@protonmail could start by actually attending various open source conferences. There are several of them only in Europe. #FOSDEM is the largest one (actually happening this weekend), @devconf_cz is another one, with lots of #Linux distribution focus as well.

Sending HR folks and developers to these conferences, having a stand somewhere, meeting people is a solid way to find new hires with a specific skill set.

@amju_wolf @alex_herrero

Yupp, that's my understanding as well.

But Proton also insists on doing the packaging and distribution of it outside the ordinary distribution paths Linux distros uses (apt/yum/dnf repos or flatpak) ... So they waste time and energy on getting stuff working properly across a broader range of Linux distributions.

The end result will therefore most likely be a poorer user experience where some features don't work well on some distros. Depending on how their "package" will manage to integrate on the distro installing it.

@isVeryLoud @LunchEnjoyer

Where did they say that? They don't even have possibilities for remote work?

@Prototype9215 @LunchEnjoyer @LinkOpensChest_wav

That's what really happens when @protonmail insists on doing everything on their own, not even doing the continuous development in the open. They provide source code updates only on stable releases, and even that can be delayed some days until after the release.

That's not how you build a community of users, developers and package maintainers.

Had they instead spent resources getting their Linux packages into the native package streams for the most important distros, they would have solved more bugs earlier with help from the community.

That is probably the most disappointing aspect of Proton. They still don't grasp how to interact with a broader community, to get real help.

They would still need to review contributions, just as I expect they do with changes from their own employees. So it wouldn't reduce the security.

Also, they can't really hide behind the code not being ready to be published; they code is being published in the end.

But they really miss the opportunity to get their packages into the standard Lunux repositories. Which would help resolving all the incompatibility issues they now have with certain Linux distributions.

On top of that, all the needed tooling required already exists. It just need to implemented correctly in their processes.