Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I’ve found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.

But, it’s really nice to have if I get lost when I’m in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.

That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don’t need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.

That said, I’d like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I’m happy with. I’m optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I’d like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.

It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.

This whole damned division is just trying to hang on for dear life.

Give me a Nexus S or Moto X 2013, but I’d probably be happier with a Nexus 5 for the extra screen size. But man, the Nexus S and Moto X (also the Palm Pre) were just so nice in the hand.

To be fair, the bezels were huge by today’s standards, and one of the main (non-Apple) competitors had a hardware keyboard below the screen. Just think how much more usable these old smaller phones would be, if we had the screen to body ratio of the Pixel 9a.

Yup, I jumped around a lot early on, but Debian was home. It’s hard to break if you follow the Debian way, and it’s definitely stable. I still use it for server and lab stuff, because I can write a doc and come back in 18 months and is still largely reproducible.

I’ve used a LOT of distros over the years, and Arch is home now (technically Cachy at the moment), but Debian is probably my second favorite. Fedora is 3rd, for user friendly polish.

It’s better than the OSS days, at least. And I dare say Pipewire is better in most situations than Alsa, can’t really speak for Jack. It’s really trying to be that unifying, centralizing force that allows us to move past the Frankenstein mess. But, well…

I believe the search term you’re looking for is ‘multi-seat’.

Yes. Make sure you’re installing the beta, they never really release stable anymore from what I can tall.

Unfortunately, that might just mean that this is when the truly scary part begins, as they start trying to keep a grasp on their dreams of absolute power.

I was thinking the same with my 7840u. Could try something a bit more cutting edge than Mint, though I will admit I have no idea how up to date they keep the kernel these days. Though if they live boot, they’re removing the SSD and likely qtile from the equation, so it’s a bit tricky to isolate.

Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you’ll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.

Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.

In my experience, it’s usually power users or basic users with very specific application requirements, who have trouble moving between operating systems. There’s usually a FOSS alternative to those applications, but often requires reworking a workflow or upskilling more than they want to. But they’re still basic users so it’s more a speed bump than a road block.

So yeah, most people can switch to MacOS without an issue, and the vast majority of those can switch to a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and quickly feel comfortable.

Power users get stuck in this situation where they’ve learned how to do advanced things in Windows, have things tweaked to support more complex and peculiar workflows, but often don’t understand the actual concepts behind them. And even if they do understand the concepts, they still have to learn the alternatives in a new OS, and rebuild their workflows. Now, there’s a lot more ability to learn behind the scenes about the why and how with Linux and BSD, so I’d argue they’d be better off to just suck it up and get started, and they’ll be better off before long.

I’m with you. I’ve never really liked the look of QT, but I think I’m going to go for it anyway. It’s always felt more plasticky and artificial, compared to GTK feeling more grounded and earthy. Plus, KDE has always felt cluttered in every way they can clutter it. So I was into the boxes (I was partial to fluxbox) and XFCE back in the day. Played with Gnome 3 a bit, had a cyclical love and ultimately hate relationship with it, but got hung up on Gnome as the best option when I wanted to switch to Wayland.

I’ve been using Cosmic since January, and I like it, but I’m left wanting more out of it. I was thinking of spinning my own environment with LabWC, but… meh. It’s a lot of work, and I want something more integrated.

I’ve been using KDE in Asahi on my Macbook Air a bit, and I guess I could use it more. But I don’t really use that machine a ton, either. Mostly for it’s better speakers than my Thinkpad, and I have it connecting a VPN automatically until I can be bothered to switch from iwd/systemd to network manager on my primary.

God I wish Gnome would change it’s tune, and stop being so militantly simplistic. The idea of extensions is great, but using a rolling release distro is rough when you’re relying on a bunch of extensions to make your DE suitable. I really like their approach to UX at it’s foundation. Cosmic is showing a lot of promise, and has that configurability built in, and I do look forward to where it goes. but it’s going to have this problem where a lot of the software that looks best in it is libadwaita, which enforces drastically different UX.

Ah, now I remember why I bought the Macbook.

I did a stint on Mint Mobile for 2 months while I was experimenting with jmp.chat, ported back to US Mobile on Verizon last week. As a bonus, Graphene got Verizon’s visual voicemail working while I was away, still can’t get T-Mobile’s working without their crappy app.

There are huuuuuuge gaps in T-Mobile in the north woods, which honestly, I’m kind of ok with since I’m looking to start using my phone mostly through KDE Connect. But visual voicemail has been a sticking point for me for awhile. Satellite is interesting to be sure, but it’s going to double my US Mobile bill at $10 for 2GB if I remember their pricing correctly. That’s not a huge deal, but for something with very limited capabilities at the moment… eh. Also, fuck Elon Musk.

I’ll see what happens with Graphene’s phone, or if I give in and buy a Fairphone. I really want an SD card for music. I’m less than thrilled with DAPs, and might just get a Fairphone with a dongle running Lineage for that, while I continue using my Pixel 8 on Graphene as my phone for now. I’d love to merge the two, though.

Also considering an Xperia to run Sailfish, but I’d have to go back to I think an Xperia 10 OG version to get band 13 and Verizon support. That’s a 6 year old phone, and only supports 512GB SD cards. Might actually be able to mount larger, especially in Sailfish, but… I’ll see if I can get one cheap maybe.

Man, I really hope they’re the manufacturing partner GrapheneOS is talking about, or they at least include Verizon support on future models. T-mobile just doesn’t do it for me out in the middle of the forest.

I know, but it’s looking more and more like there won’t be an alternative for long. I’d rather have a consortium of interests united in moving a fork forward as the core for all of their own OS’s.

I really wish Sony would come back to the US market. I’m tempted to get an older Xperia device to run Sailfish, but it would be like 4-5 years old, and it’s time on the Verizon network would be limited.

It’s on the N350, and is going to be pretty limited, though well supported in mainline.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241638/intel-core-3-processor-n350-6m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz/specifications.html

Honestly, I don’t know if having play services running in a profile that can be deleted would pass that standard for certification. Probably not, I guess.

As for being a fork, I mean the larger community of Graphene, Lineage, Calyx if it continues to exist, and probably a couple Chinese manufacturers who rely on AOSP to manage a fork that is collaboratively developed going forward, that no longer relies on Google’s maintenance of the project.

That’s definitely one way I’ve been looking, the hinge makes it enough tablet for me probably. Though the Starlite is passively cooled, which I really like. Right now I just have two laptops, a Thinkpad P14s and an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My ideal would probably be to go back to a desktop, and then have something like a passively cooled ARM or RISC V (obviously anticipating the future on both of those) Framework 12. Or even an N350 in a passive Framework 12, like in the Starlite. This would be more of a writing/browsing/video machine for when I’m lazing around or out at a coffee shop or whatever.

Ah well, the P14s is fine for now, and RAM is too damned expensive to buy anything right now anyway.