> I think also (sorry to say this Werner!) the problem is that > GnuPG is Linux cli based and not like MacPGP from Mr. Zimmermann, > back in the 90's was GUI based with much lesser commands and > easier to learn. There was back then no Enigmail or other > MUA plug-ins and you could simply copy and paste your messages.
GnuPG is cross-platform and in no way tied to Linux, but I think you have a point about the CLI-focused design of it. The problem isn't that it's CLI-based per se, but that this design has made it far too easy for it to accumulate features without much consideration for how the whole thing works together. For example, why isn't ask-cert-level a default? I'm guessing it's just because at some point it didn't exist, and the developers didn't want to make a backwards incompatible change. But it means that, out of the box, signatures on other keys are next to useless, because it's not possible to specify how carefully you've checked a key. This leads to people only signing keys that they've very carefully checked, and makes it so that marginal signatures see almost no use, which I think has likely been a major contributor to the failure of the web of trust. A large part of what makes alternative encryption software like Signal successful is its simplicity. I don't have to worry about the 3000 different setting combinations available to me, because there's design work been put into it to set me up for success out of the box. I've spent hours of my life learning about how to use GnuPG, and have ended up with a way of using it that seems completely different to anybody else's, but I still don't think I'm doing it right. It's not possible to figure out how to use it as intended, because there's no intended way to use it. There's no high level design for how people are supposed to use the software. And without that, it's never going to be possible to use GnuPG properly no matter how much time one is willing to invest.
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