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I mean, I'm not asking why something easy to use is used more than something not easy to use. That would be silly. Maybe someone thought that, and that's why I got downvoted? What you've replied can be reduced to "because it's easier to use". These are not the thoughts I'm after, so let me clarify / reiterate.

I'm asking why a highly usable technology that has been in existence for two decades has not found its way into a accessible easy to use implementation. Seemed like an interesting thing to get an opinion on, but I also don't care enough to offend anyone.




> a highly usable technology

I think the consensus is that GPG isn't easy to use. Perhaps it only seems easy to use for you because you're used to it? Kinda like git. Git's UX is objectively bad but it doesn't bother me because using it is second nature now. I don't think it would be easy for a non-programmer to pick up.

That's why people use document versioning provided by Google/Microsoft/Apple/Dropbox/Adobe rather than using git from the command line. It's the same with GPG.


What's wrong with gits usability?


I think you're being obtuse, either intentional or not. The technology is useful because of what it does, and my ability to use it is irrelevant. In a "nuclear fusion is a useful technology" sense. Everything else I've explained twice now should have made that explicit and abundantly clear, so, I think I'm done here. Feel free to not continue this conversation.


I think many open source technologies drop the ball when it comes to integrating a nice application. Seems that the protocol and implementation is nice, but the user interface is lacking. Perhaps that is not an interesting part of development for the GPG team.


There are many GUI frontends for GnuPG, if that's useful to someone:

https://www.gnupg.org/software/frontends.html


You said "usable" when you meant "useful". And then you got upset when I took your comment at face value. Talk about childish.


That was indeed a autocorrect issue, and if that was what caused the confusion, I apologize. I've also done nothing but reiterate the same point from the start, which you seemed quite opposed to consider. This has also devolved into name-calling, so, not sure why you bothered at all.

Even if admittedly, the word "usable" (hard to misunderstand in the context, IMO) should have been "useful", the usable part of this could very much have been for other knowledgeable software developers/designers for it to be the backend of something user-friendly. As such, not even "usable" in that context would have been wrong. Regardless, this would require some modicum willingness for benefit of doubt, which, I do not expect at this point. My only advice to you, is that perhaps don't assume people are children, and perhaps you'll find it easier to see meaning in their arguments.


https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html Is a pretty good tear down of pgp. It doesn’t sound like pgp can be made more usable.


That was a very interesting read, and covers all the issues I had with GPG/PGP broken down on a per-use-case basis, which is really neat. Fairly up-to-date too (aside from maybe WhatsApp mentioned alongside Signal). In any case, thanks for sharing! Nice to see simplified and somewhat modernized tools like (https://github.com/str4d/rage) and (https://github.com/FiloSottile/age)

The article that post mentions in the beginning also had some interesting perspectives, though a bit older.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...




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