This is one of those articles that demonstrates why email should be distributed. Letting Google and Microsoft run email for the planet is just asking for problems. There are some technical demands to running email services, but they are still in reach of the technically inclined individual or organization. If for no other reason, it would help keep the big mail service providers honest.

At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser on Linux or BSD.

An attempt to write English based on Anglo-Saxon runes (Futhorc) devised by Nothelm Hurlebatte.

I think it depends on your needs. Working corporate environments with 1000+ hosts, LTS operating systems are big help. On the other hand, for smaller cases, call it a work group or smaller, I think OpenBSD provides a base system that doesn't typically make drastic changes, along with a ports collection that does a pretty good job of keeping up with the third party applications. It's a good balance. I've recently seen some "Immutable" Linux distributions that are basically spins of upstream distributions. They leave the inherited distribution mostly alone and load the extras using Flatpak or the like. Sounds similar to BSD ports in a way.

The Trinity Desktop Environment is still carrying the KDE 3.5 torch. The Q4OS Linux distribution (Debian based) provides it as a primary desktop.

There's also Exe GNU/Linux if you prefer a Devuan base:

https://exegnulinux.net/

Another way to think about it is that the terminal has become software, like many other things. Web browsers have become a terminal of sorts too.

This clearly shows the risk of letting someone else run your email services.

I read this with some interest because I've self hosted personal email since about 2001, with experience in email management going back to 1995. The challenges presented are certainly true enough, but I still think self hosting is still worth it. I'd rather not share the management of private keys with DNS (DNSSEC) and email service providers (STARTTLS, SMTPS, DKIM, POP3S, IMAPS). I'd like to keep them, well, private. It also provides the opportunity to see the mail queue, and mail server logs. I find that helpful.

I'd call it more than a shell. It's more like a text oriented Lisp (Emacs Lisp to be specific) runtime environment with built in editing, interpretation, compilation, and debugging tools. It's also been a popular home for numerous applications that have found lives of their own, far beyond editing text.

I like to call it a generalized interface to information.

The web of the early 1990s could be called the same thing, but not the modern web, which is more like a "generalized experience-delivery platform with an old much-simpler generalized interface to information at its core".

Regarding the Common Lisp writings, I rather liked the third edition of LISP by Patrick Henry Winston and Berthold K.P. Horn (1989).