A lot of FOSS solutions have funny names, mascots, etc. I’m surprised if IT/tech workers aren’t used to it. Just politely tell them, yes, it has slightly silly branding, but look past it and it’s software that does what you want.

Yes, it can be a bit involved. I’d say I can spin up a mail server in 1–2 days though provided the OS is already installed and I have a domain name and port 25 isn’t blocked (that’s the main one that tends to be blocked). It may take longer for people who aren’t familiar with mail servers but it’s not some huge operation.

You can just try spinning up a mail server for fun. If it goes badly then just don’t move over your dentist appointments to it. It’s only critical infra if you use it for critical things, which you probably shouldn’t till it’s stable.

I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I’ve not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.

I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I’ve not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It’s also a fun learning experience.

I think I hauve covid

Inspect element? Or many other various ways of making a fake wikipedia screenshot that don’t involve editing the actual article.

Camboy

Do you mean to don’t write some message to root@xolat.games? 🤔

You can, but most email servers redirect mail to root@xolat.games to some other user eg xolatgames@xolat.games. The root user usually does not have their own inbox.

I’m not sure why hello is trying to write to /home/root then, that’s your problem. Do you have any Postfix aliases set up? Check /etc/postfix/aliases (there’s a chance it’s in a different location; the output of postconf alias_maps will tell you where it is).

But what’s the configs do you need? 🤔 Dovecot has about 20 separated configuration files! Do I will need to put each of them?

Just post the output of doveconf -n. Redact any sensitive info.

Just reading the first logs you pasted, it tells you the answer there. You can’t receive emails because you’re trying to receive emails as root, and writing emails to the home directory. Dovecot doesn’t run as root so it can’t write to root’s home directory.

You would ordinarily not receive mail as root. Most people set up root to redirect to your actual user. Look into Postfix aliases.

Try emailing a non-root user. It should write to the inbox. I mean, without your Dovecot configs, I can’t tell if there’s anything else wrong with them, but from the errors it seems Dovecot would work if not for the permissions errors.

Tbh was quite painless for me! Had a few hiccups but it was educational to troubleshoot them, and once it’s up and running, I haven’t had to touch it for the most part. Had to update my Dovecot configs when they changed the config syntax but that’s all I can think of. And will probably see about switching from spamassassin to rspamd because I swear spamassassin has so many false positives no matter how many false positives I feed to it to train it. But it’s really not so bad, and I would recommend it as a decent learning opportunity for folks who like tinkering with computers.

Email’s probably the most satisfying. I learnt a lot in setting up my own email server, and it’s nice being in complete control (well, of my end of things at least, ofc not of the other person’s end) of such an essential service.

Matrix works well for me.

It’s not out yet, but I’d keep an eye on Flatline. It’s by the people who make Molly (Signal client fork—it’s pretty good, been using it for years). Flatline is a Molly-compatible server implementation, i.e. so that you can host your own Signal server. Because generally if someone asked for a “reliable messenger for family use” I’d recommend Signal as a polished and reliable option, though not self-hostable unfortunately.

Enjoying the term daemond.

I see, that’s interesting. Well glad that it’s not hard to switch away from systemd on Debian for those who want it—although I still think if you don’t want systemd you should just pick another distro, given that the Debian installer doesn’t let you pick another init.

On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc

Huh really? Then why does Devuan exist? (I don’t use Debian for context)

I use Alpine for servers because I like its simplicity. Not in terms of computational power requirements, just in terms of user experience.

Alpine is an interesting choice for hosting

I’d say servers are one of the main uses of Alpine, second to containers. It would be a much more unusual choice for a desktop OS.

Alpine already uses OpenRC. There’s no option to use systemd with Alpine.

Popular alternatives include runit (which Void uses), OpenRC (Gentoo and Alpine), s6, sysVinit, dinit. The suckless people have also written some suckless inits—I think one of them’s called sinit.

So what are the alternatives that work with both Alpine and Debian?

None. On Alpine you can only use OpenRC and on Debian you can only use systemd. Most distros don’t let you change out the init system. If you want systemdless Debian look into Devuan.

Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system as, no disrespect intended, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know what init systems your operating systems (Alpine and Debian) are using, let alone the details of different init systems.

Some people have strong opinions about init systems. They are nerds with reasons behind those opinions. You don’t seem to have many reasons and you don’t seem to be particularly invested in the debate. I would say it’s not worth your time to change operating system (which is what you would need to do to change your init) just because you heard vaguely that systemd is bad. If you reach a point where init system matters to you, then you won’t need to be asking the questions you’re asking in the OP.

So I was curious and looked it up because I would have assumed that stars/suns are much hotter than that.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/110323-coldest-star-discovered-cup-coffee-brown-dwarf-hawaii-space-science

Turns out the coldest star is 97°C at its surface. So I guess CPUs regularly reach (coldest) star temperature?

I think the point about convenience is more about familiarity than Windows being inherently easier. Speaking as someone who switched from Linux to Windows previously, I found the change very difficult as a lot of the FOSS software I was using didn’t have Windows versions. I had a nightmare trying to read one of my LUKS-encrypted drives on Windows. I was practically using WSL for everything. That’s not that Windows is inherently harder than Linux; it’s just that I was used to Linux and the FOSS ecosystem, just as some are used to Windows and their proprietary ecosystem.

If your hardware isn’t working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.

Most drivers come pre-installed with the Linux kernel or your distro—I never had to manually install any drivers for my current hardware. Compared to Windows where you will have to go out of your way to install graphics drivers for NVIDIA or AMD depending on your graphics card, if you want to make the most out of your card’s capabilities.

Installers made for Windows don’t need any special TLC; you double-click them and they work.

See, I think if you’ve used Linux for any length of time you’d quickly find the system of package managers way easier than the system of having to hunt down an .exe on the internet, guess whether or not it’s a legit copy or if it’s malware, and manually manage updates for all the different software you have installed.

I agree that people stay on Windows out of convenience, but it’s not convenience as in Windows is inherently easier, but it’s convenience as in you’re used to the way things work on Windows. Because in my perspective, things do “just work” on Linux, and that’s because I’m used to the way things work here.