If you use GNU Emacs, you can use Wanderlust.

emacswiki.org/emacs/WanderLust

It relies on Emacs' ability to render HTML, for yucky HTML email, which isn't terrible, but it may not be as pretty as as a browser-based mailer, or one with a true browser plugin.

Some people also use GNUS for email, but I don't like it for that purpose.

Have you looked at any others here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparis…

I've played with Claws and it seemed impressive and it is still actively developed. There's also still active work on Sylpheed too, and Vivaldi has its own MUA now as well.

Also, just ditch Windows completely! That's a lot less MS in your life!

I'd avoid Linux too and go for a BSD, maybe FreeBSD for a desktop or laptop, but that's just me. On the other hand my desktop is macOS, with a fullscreen X11 workspace dedicated to my "real" computers mostly running NetBSD. I even run NetBSD VMs in macOS.

All things considered macOS is about a billion orders of magnitude better than Windows for the desktop and laptop. Apple Mail is not the world's worst MUA by far (though Mail on iOS is horrid).

The problems I had with Apple's changes are long over -- they've still not improved everything even back to the feature levels they were at during their best days, and like everyone they're adding so-called "A.I." to things, but in general they continue to maintain and even improve on core strengths like usability, reliability and manageability, and perhaps most important of all, security.

I think most of their "decline" was due to rewrites of applications as they moved away from Objective-C, mostly towards Swift if I understand correctly, but they communicated their intent poorly and they pushed new versions of apps out before they were anywhere near feature-equivalent.

In their core OS they still seem to favour complexity over simplicity and elegance, and they have a very strong lean towards "not invented here" mentality and away from some standards. But they keep it working smoothly. I haven't had a bad update in a couple of decades now.

Yeah, but it's trivial to work around Gatekeeper if absolutely necessary and 99.9% of users will never need to install anything third party that will need the workaround anyway. It doesn't affect open-source developers in the slightest as stuff you compile locally works by default -- I've only ever turned it off temporarily once, and that might have been a decade ago.

Also, it is really not actually a "walled garden" it's a critical security feature that ordinary users REALLY need. You simply can't have this level of security without some key controls that are not on by default and strongly recommended. It doesn't even go far enough in many respects. It does make the job of scammers far harder, and it offers significant protections against 0-day exploits, but it isn't total protection. Calling it a "walled garden" is effectively propaganda, but I'm not sure who it benefits. Apple haters, certainly, but what do they gain, other than spreading hate? Microsoft? The same claim applies equally, but in different ways, to Microsoft's stuff where there are not the same security benefits because it's far too trivial to work around.

Any Apple users not sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to protect themselves from scams should probably even enable full "Lockdown Mode". That's a more complete form of protection, and any scammer asking a target to turn it off is effectively showing their hand.

Wow, getting around Apple's walled garden sounds like a pain to someone who is used to using operating systems where installing and maintaining third party software is purposefully made easy.

I remember back when people claimed installing software on OSX was dead easy. Just drag and drop! Well, by the time I needed to actually do it, it was not so easy. All I needed, at the time, was a web browser supported by Cox Communication's web viewer, and Disney+ at the time. I chose Chrome, and the initial install seemed easy enough ... just drag and drop.

But the resulting web browser wouldn't remember settings or saved passwords ... like it was running fresh every time.

Okay, maybe Google was doing something shady to make their web browser work badly with MacOS but I dunno. Anyway, I didn't feel like climbing the learning curve on MacOS.

Ultimately, I just ended up waiting and eventually Disney+ started working again on Linux (it was never technically incapable, their web player simply stopped working with Linux all of a sudden at some point when some genius decided they really needed to screw over Linux users for some reason).

The bottom line is that MacOS goes out of its way to make it more difficult to install and maintain software outside of its walled garden, and on iOS even more so.

I'll never use MacOS ever again. It's just too much of a pain, and I don't see any benefits of it over what I am already familiar with working with. No benefits whatsoever. None at all.

Some day, I might use BSD for something, maybe, but at least there I'd have a lot lower learning curve and, depending on what I choose, installing and maintaining software will be easy and I won't have to work around the OS to do it.

Yeah, well the App Store is a necessary evil -- there are too many apps anyway.

I am indeed talking mainly about macOS, nee OSX.

I already get updates, security, and administration with, say, Debian. As for "ease-of-use" ... uh no. MacOS is not easy, especially not compared to Linux.

It may seem easy to use for someone who has already climbed the learning curve of using it, but it's honestly bewildering except for using pre-installed software to do simple things.

Naturally, Debian also has a learning curve. But overall I think it's no contest. I wish I could say the same thing about Ubuntu, because it's so popular for newbies, but ... Ubuntu has gone off in weird tangents for no good reason. Oh well. The worst thing about Ubuntu was the decision to encourage multiple disparate software package management systems.

I like how Debian encourages users to stick with the "Debian way", and if it's not available in the Debian apt repositories ... okay, you can install and maintain yourself but you know what you're getting into.

Oh well, at least with my own Ubuntu machines I can stick to the "Debian way" rather than going off into those unfortunate tangents.