Yep. Exactly this. I’m white and my wife is black. We live in one of the states where our relationship was a crime just 55 years ago.

Her grandfather has stories about what happened to people who crossed the race barrier (of course the law only punished minorities for it, not the white partner). We’re not far removed from those horrors and lunatics are already trying to drag us back.

I’ve used OnlyOffice (FOSS, really modern) and Softmaker Office, which is a proprietary German alternative with native Linux support. It also has the best docx compatibility of the Microsoft alternatives.

When I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old, my family lived in this old house that used to be a Civil War hospital during a few battles.

All kinds of weird shit happened there, but one event stands out.

I was sleeping between my parents in their bed on the second floor. I woke up. It was late and very dark.

I looked to my right and saw the curtains blowing in. The windows were painted shut. I watched as the curtains start to slide off the wall. It looked like someone was holding them up. I shit you not. Like I could see feet just underneath the bottom.

The curtains moved to the foot of the bed, and fell.

I don’t remember seeing this, but my parents swear I told them that when the curtains fell, a woman with a yellow dress and no eyes had been holding them up, and that she stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

The curtains, according to my parents, we’re in fact on the floor at the foot of the bed. I can’t vouch for that though because I was a kid and frankly, don’t remember.

My best non-supernatural explanation is that I had sleep paralysis that night and hallucinated much of what I saw. I’ve had it chronically since, so it’s possible.

I don’t know though. It’s one of those things I think about late at night when I have too much free time. What the fuck did I see?

Good point! That’s an option for most email providers, and that’s fine for most applications. I just like using a desktop client, but if you don’t, then that’s not even a factor for Tutanota.

I personally like Mailfence. But the others aren’t bad alternatives either.

Fastmail is Australia-based, so it’s a privacy nightmare. If you’re okay with that, it’s cheap and works. You get a lot of storage for what you pay.

Tutanota is a German option, but you have to use their email client. They use a custom encryption protocol instead of your typical PGP. They’re good, but at the end of the day I like my third party email client.

Mailfence is Belgian and only has infrastructure in Belgium. So they don’t even respond to court orders outside that jurisdiction. They offer PGP. Also support IMAPS, etc, so you can use your own email client.

I don’t like ProtonMail, and I know this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t like them. They have been busted giving client data to law enforcement without a warrant, they don’t encrypt the email subject line, they still log IPs like every other service, and they received a ton of venture capital funding. I fully expect their enshittification to happen soon.

Posteo and mailbox(.)org are also options. Never used them so I can’t vouch. I hear good things about both though.

And if you’re in Europe or have your own domain, Infomaniak offers a suite comparable to Google’s at a competitive price. I haven’t used it either but it could be good.