Yep, didn’t use it much but I have studio headphones that I lliked to plug from time to time.

I think it varies from person to person. My gf can’t tell the difference at all, even when she really tries, neither can a friend of mine (who also use the most insane jerky screen settings on his TV). For me, I can’t imagine going back to 60hz ever again. It feels like something is physically wrong with my phone if I turn 120hz off.

I think Moto is actually Lenovo now?

You get 2 or maybe 3 years of updates and then the device is trash.

Yeah, I’ve noticed this as well…

… which is why I was surprised when I read that Nothing Phone 3 will get 5 years of updates + 2 years of security updates.

androidauthority.com/nothing-phone-3-software-upd…

Nothing’s Co-Founder and Head of Marketing, Akis Evangelidis, has confirmed that the upcoming Nothing Phone 3 will ship with a “5+7” software update promise. …likely means the phone will get five years of Android version updates and seven years of security patches…

Although, you can’t install GrapheneOS on Nothing phones… so, 🤷

Just because it doesn’t have latest Android doesn’t mean it’s trash. And Fairphone also aims for 7 years support just like your Pixel example.

All phones that are sold in the EU now have to have 5 years of updates after the phone is no longer sold.

Basically, all phones have 6+ years of updates now.

anything not Google or Samsung is, as it’s always been, software support.

Motorola.has 5 years on most of its new phones nowadays

Unfortunately for the EU only.

Motorola is full of bloatware. Can not recommend.

The hardware is fine, though.

Stroke posting

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

So… we are nearly there but unless you have a very VERY minimum usage of your phone, basically a dumb phone with a bit of CLI to remote connect to your own server from time to time, it’s probably not practical for now.

…and, that’s me.

I gave up on my phones. There’s no way to remain connected to the modern world and my own without just keeping everything off of my phone and using it entirely in stock NPC mode. Trackers? Adware? Malware? Doesn’t matter, I only use it for calls, banking apps and cash apps. How do I access my personal, more 1337 haxxor shit?

Laptop, although I can do a lot of work over ssh on phones and use things like syncthing and nextcloud to get around the ecosystem, still, but for the most part, I’m back in 2007, baby! We’re carrying messenger bags! We don’t care!

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.

Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn’t a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?

Unfortunately many of the apps needed just to exist as a member of society are only available in the Play Store.

I feel like the standard should be two phones. A disposable ‘banking’ phone: tiny, no camera, no speakers, small SoC, just the absolute bare minimum to live.

…And then a ‘media’ phone without all the enshittification.

The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.

That’s probably to reduce brigading? Android and iOS are infested with all sorts of fraduelnt marketing techniques like fake reviews, and mass fraud reporting for competition sounds like another.

My experience with the iOS app store years ago was worse than Android. Searching for apps that were not chock full of spam was useless. I had to research the apps outside of the store then find direct links to them due to clones with the same names.

I have no idea why Apple and Google allow so much hot garbage in their app stores.

Your options are mostly UBTouch and PostmarketOS. Due to how PMOS is designed, it doesnt fully function on the phones it supports. UBTouch does work well due to the ability to use a driver compatibility layer with android IIRC, but you still have the issue of needing a phone that can support it. (I think the latest pixel UBTouch runs on is the 3?)

also, the security model of mobile linux is nowhere near what android is. Things that keep android secure like verified boot are not yet implemented on linux phone OSes AFAIK

My last iPhone was a iPhone 5. Or 6, maybe?

Fast forward, and I’ve been on Android until right now, when I got an iPhone 16 in a loss-leader sale.

…And I am astounded by how much worse it is. My old jailbroken iPhone’s UI was both simpler and 100x times more customizable and useful than all these bizzare required gestures; I spent days trying to teach my Mom and grandpa how to use it, to no avail. At the same time, its as uncustomizable as ever.

I had basically every feature the 16 has now, like the action button, and more. And it somehow feels slower in browsing than my SD845 Android 9 phone.

It wasn’t perfect back then, but the App Store is flooded with garbage now.

I literally want my iPhone 5 back. WTF has Apple been doing?

In eu you kinda can for some degree

You can, but it is a pita. Having to buy dev certs and sign the .ipa file, etc. But technically, if you really want to, you can.

I like Gemini a lot and use it often, but I did disable it for web search.

The article is 7 years old. Has anything come to fruition since then?

Yeah how the hell do you do this?

What’s wrong with tapless payment with cards?

There are Google Play Android bank apps (mine works fine), and you can use mobile sites as dedicated app drawer icons. Their mobile site is top notch.

NFC payments won’t come anytime soon to native GNU/Linux, but I don’t use them. Maybe Google Wallet works, I haven’t tried and don’t know if NFC can be passed through to Waydroid. OnePlus 6 is the best supported originally Android phone for GNU/Linux, someone with that would need to test.

I just have my card in a silicon sleeve on the back of the phone and I get the same effect. I’d rather Google not have my purchase history anyways.

Satnav there is Pure Maps (OSM client), which can connect to sources like HERE to get traffic data to provide voiced guided turn-by-turn instructions. Of course there is also all the Android apps like Google Maps available, and their mobile site works fine.

On the topic of mobile sites, you can also install them as dedicated app drawer icons via Gnome Web & Firefox PWA for any site.

This means if your bank app doesn’t like vanilla Android, GApps, you can use a comparable dedicated web app.

For parking, I’ve found a surprising amount have mobile sites, so I don’t need to install their bloaty Android app onto my GNU/Linux phone.

root is a security risk on many security focused ROMs.

See the 4th reply in this GrapheneOS thread

and this from CalyxOS’s FAQ

If you can link the xposed module though I wouldnt mind making a feature request and asking for the module itself to be integrated into their forks.

“[…] leave bluetooth always on”

That’s a really lousy excuse in support of enshittification.

How do you know most of users want that?

Even if most of them do, that still negatively impacts literally millions of users who don’t want that.

Most is anywhere from 50.1% to 99.9%

So what are you actually saying? Because you aren’t being very precise.

Most people want to engage in hetero sexuality, so everyone who didn’t shouldn’t get to?

That’s the same logic you are using, I highly doubt you would agree that all non hetero relations should be discarded and given a giant middle finger. If you do feel that way JFC go touch grass or whatever

Well who made the decision to put non-system apps in the system partition?

I know, and that’s exactly my point. They used to be in the user space, now they are in the system partition. They CHOSE to do this.

Please do stay on GOS. I already suffered for 2 days for the whole community.

May I suggest you give RethinkDNS a shot? At first it’s kind of convoluted to configure, but once you have it set up the way you want, it’s smooth sailing from there.

github.com/celzero/rethink-app

I had to use MS Authenticator for work and it worked in GOS, notifications and all. Now, that was about a year ago, and I haven’t tried it since. At the speed GAFAM are enshitifying everything, there’s a chance it doesn’t work anymore. I keep a Pixel 8a stock for banking and some other apps that I need (such as EV charging networks) and won’t work or are unsustainably wonky on GOS. As I mentioned in another post, RethinkDNS is worth it, but it does take some trial and error to get it to work without breaking stuff I need, but once I got there, it was all good (that’s how I keep the 8a less intrusive).

I can offer an answer as a former lover of android (12 years)…

I used to do all of the phone modding/flashing roms etc. it was like I could never be just satisfied with my phone. After years of this, I got tired of the nagging in my head to improve it. So, I switched to Apple, and it just works and I don’t feel as though I’m missing out on anything.

So, yes I don’t have to be on my phone all of them time other than when I actually need it.

So far it’s been good for about a week. Highlights have been the easy install, secure by default but lets me override when I want (block app network access on install is awesome), and getting access to the other app repos than Google’s I haven’t seen since I installed dirty unicorns years ago. I setup multiple users so I can keep my primary like a root which was also simple to do.

Only complaints I have are when I get messages on another user than primary I can see the messages in the app but not the message content in the notification, its just a generic alert message like new messages received. Nice to have but not going to make me switch back. And the keyboard doesn’t have swipe typing so I use gboard with network access turned off.

Also I did install the Google app store to get a couple paid apps and calendar/contacts I need to move out of Google. It does sandbox by default which is really cool and i think should be required for phone manufacturers. I just disabled services/store/calendar access to the network after I let it download everything.

Edit: also not a OS thing but I tried switching VPN to orbot/tor at the same time and it is still really unreliable for that use with the way so many sites try to sniff out your location

Organic Maps is great in many ways. It’s maps are so much better. But the lack of traffic data is a killer for route planning in the UK. All the open source maps suffer this. There needs to be open access traffic information for there to be competition.

In Settings you select Power as the function of the Power Button instead of Digital Assistant. Then the power button works like it should.

Graphene is the only one that gets rid of webview right?

i’m currently using redmi note 13 pro, can i install any of these OS?