I’m not German, but I would know better than to praise a pick from the AfD.

The Proton CEO thought that the party taking bribe after bribe from oil companies to Tech-bros, and which removed the FTC chairwoman that was bringing anti-trust cases against amazon and publicly criticized Google’s monopoly, would somehow install a good, pro-competitive and consumer rights advocate?

If he genuinely believed that, then he’s either wildly out of the loop in one of his company’s largest markets (which I’ll grant as possible, CEOs can be pretty out of touch with reality), or a fool.

This praise is, itself, ass-kissing the orange, likely in the hopes of getting in the good graces of the administration.

This article shows what happened: https://techstory.in/proton-mail-faces-backlash-over-claims-of-political-neutrality-amid-ceos-praise-for-republican-party/

Unless something has changed, I believe Windscribe also allows port forwarding.

AirVPN does as well, but as they are based in Italy, I think they may have to comply with the new Italian VPN anti-piracy law enacted there.

Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

EDIT: With more context provided by @artyom@piefed.social, this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)

To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.

Seconding the piefed recommendation. It’s much lighter to host than Lemmy, and has some nice user facing features that Lemmy lacks, which you can read more about here (scroll down to comments):

https://slrpnk.net/post/24141955/16757434

Yes. It should be enough to simply be a person of integrity.

I think they may have misspelled it. Try !smolweb@slrpnk.net

Reminds me of the intro to space quest 2.

Yes, but a user would need to be experienced enough to know how to uninstall the previous desktop environment components they don’t want, otherwise their application menu would have both DE’s applications (2 file managers, photo viewer’s, text editors, terminals, etc), which can feel a little cluttered.