one of the best products Microsoft ever produced. I absolutely LOVED my old Lumia. great phone, the OS was perfect, just an awesome all around phone. wish I still had it.

Try the Droidify app. I find it better than the main FDroid app.

I could be completely wrong as it's outside of my areas of competency, but my understanding is that the functionality was harder to achieve because of some technical reason due in part to Google/Alphabet fuckery. So another day ending in "y".

Motorola is full of bloatware. Can not recommend.

The hardware is fine, though.

Both ARM itself and Linux for ARM has been standardizing a fair bit recently. But not to the extent to be fully generic, mostly just enough for portable bootable kernels - and after that you still need all the same custom drivers and configurations to make proper use of a SoC, but it's not nothing.

EBBR spec to bring standardization to embedded Linux boot process

At Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Arm’s Grant Likely explains how an emerging, UEFI-based EBBR spec could standardize embedded Linux firmware bootup behavior using standard bootloaders like U-Boot.

LinuxGizmos.com (linuxgizmos.com)

Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.

iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.

The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn't care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That's the magic of capitalism.

Thanks for the write up! It honestly sounds like it’s be fine for me. My iPhone is already extremely bare and stripped down. I barely use the camera too, so like, idk I don’t feel like I’d be missing much?

If I could buy a super cheap used one for testing, I’d do it. I’m waiting for my iPhone SE to die on me anyways before making the switch.

Not true, it can be bought in the US at Murena's website.

Cool! Last tine I checked out wasn't there. Must have been added recently.

I find myself using desktop Linux more than my mobile device, even on the couch with the family. Monitors on arms that can swing out of the way ftw. No cute advice for keyboards though. We have wireless ones around but I still use my wired Deck Legend on my lap. It’s an old mechanical keyboard that’s built like a tank, with the PCB literally mounted to a sheet of metal that is mounted inside the housing, lol.

It’s almost a shame, because smart phones are still absolutely amazing to me as far as the amount of scientific and technical advancement that can fit in the palm of your hand. But I look forward to the open options various parties are working on.

Mobile GNU/Linux is getting better, but I think it is 5-10 years out from what's needed. I suppose people need to adopt Desktop first. The nice thing is you can install Android apps including Google Play on it natively, and they appear in your app drawer like a regular app

If by any chance you can be in Brussels for a bit, I can lend you mine for a while to test.

banking apps and cash apps

Unfortunately that's prevents from switching to Linux proper over (hopefully deGoogled) Android.

Thanks for these, especially the "we're not going anywhere" link. I was hesitant to switch because I was worried about future support on my Pixel 7. Here's the full quote for anyone that didn't check the above link:

Many companies and individuals are trying to mislead people about the future of GrapheneOS to promote their insecure products and services. GrapheneOS is not going anywhere. We've made it clear we're shipping Android 16 soon and that the supported devices will remain supported.

It's a bit of a catch honestly.

OSS/community Linux graphical environments have kind of always been ~5 years out from what's needed. 15 years ago they were behind ~5 years, 5 years ago they where behind ~5 years.

The only difference is today. I think they're only behind by ~3-4 years thanks to the backwards movement of things like Windows and OSx staleness.

Mobile operating systems are in a worse place.

Oh my fucking god, really?!

You're so smart, that never occurred to me. I thought that there was only 27 countries in the world, and all of them were in one continent!

Yes, I do realise that, genius. I'm not from an EU country myself.

However, I engaged my brain cells and quickly realised that most phones that exist are sold in the EU, and therefore the OEM has to make and test these updates anyway. In virtually all cases they will then release these worldwide.

Like how the EU mandated USB-C and now it's worldwide. The EU has quietly become the market that sets international standards over the past 20 years.

I know it seems like I'm being mean in this comment, but fuck me it's the most Reddit comment ever. A pointless comment just begging to start a pointless argument. Nobody can be bothered with that trolling shit. Do better.

the OEM has to make and test these updates anyway. In virtually all cases they will then release these worldwide

I wouldn't be so sure. There's a vested interest in NOT shipping them outside the EU. It's called planned obsolescence. Just looks at Macs and OCLP. It's so easy to keep older Macs updated that it's actually able to be done by some random developers in their free time (not to trivialize this effort, just to say that it would be extremely trivial for Apple as the developer of the OS and one of the most profitable companies in the world to do it). And yet Apple does not ship these updates to them. Why? Because they want you to buy new shit and they know not doing so will render them virtually useless in a short time.

I know it seems like I'm being mean in this comment

You are just being mean and extremely rude. It's completely unnecessary and I've done absolutely nothing to deserve such language. You are actively making this community shittier.

It's not the "latest" Pixel generations, devices as old as the Pixel 4 receive extended support (although it's obviously not recommended) and that's mostly because Google does not support them. This will be greatly improved moving forward, since Google has promised much longer update cycles for new devices.

I appreciate that! I’m in the states unfortunately