So I recently started working at a company that uses Slack (free tier), Google Drive and Google Docs. Being a privacy conscious person I decided to do some research to see if we could transition out of at least 1 of these tools.

For Slack I thought about Element. However I have a question: is it possible to create a closed channel (meaning no unauthorized person has access to or can discover the company chat) on Element with only the free tier (it's easier to convince my boss to transition if it doesn't add to the cost structure)?

For Google Drive I don't think there are other free options that offer the 15GB of storage we have. 10GB would probably be enough. But I am also open to paid solutions.
I found out about CryptPad. They offer cloud storage but one has to pay to be at the same level of Google (which is totally understandable). They also have productivity tools integrated with the storage solution which is great.
Maybe there is some cloud storage solution that doesn't have integrated productivity tools and offers more storage. I would like to know.

I'm open to suggestions and thoughts. My functions at the company have little to do with all this, I am just interested in open source and privacy. EDIT: I am not interested in self-hosting.

Hi all. I am asking this open-ended question (bottom of this post) because I am considering making contributions to an open-source project that would directly benefit me and other users.

Some background:

I have worked with an engineering simulation software called Ansys MAPDL basically everyday for the last 4 years, in both an academic and a professional capacity. It's not necessarily relevant whether you are familiar to that program to participate in this discussion. The relevant thing is that the GUI for MAPDL is written in Tcl/Tk and I don’t imagine it is going to be modernized (because of more modern, but distinctly different, replacements). This is a screenshot of the GUI for reference.

Why do people put up with such an old interface?

The power of the program is not its GUI, but the scripting language that can be run to setup and solve simulations. The program name is really the scripting language name, Ansys Parametric Design Language (APDL). It's somewhat like Matlab. The program also offers an enormous amount of control when compared to the more modern GUI that's been released, since the modern GUI holds a totally different philosophy.

The older GUI is really helpful in certain circumstances because it will spit out a file containing commands that were used in the session. This is a great demonstration of how to run a command or use a setting/config command, but a lot of newer features are buried in the documentation and aren't available in the older GUI.

My coding experience

I know the MAPDL language very intimately, but my experience beyond it is limited to some Perl scripting, and a bit of Python exposure.

Motivation

Open-Source Ansys API

Recently, Ansys started supporting an open-source Python project called PyAnsys. MAPDL is otherwise fully closed source, and this is really the only public-facing API. PyAnsys has basically converted a lot of MAPDL script commands to a pythonic format, hence Python can now be used to interact with MAPDL. This is great for several reasons, but is limited regarding interactivity. Interacting with MAPDL via Python is basically happening in a fancy console via Jupyter notebook or IDE like Spyder. Certain commands will bring up Python-based graphics displays of solid models and results plots, but there isn't a dedicated GUI open all the time.

The Question(s)

My question is whether it is feasible to write a frontend GUI to a bunch of python commands. If you were going to do it, how would you do it? What might you write it with? Would you even do it? Is this a stupid endeavor?

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