Lineage gives you a decent app ecosystem (F-droid) with the option to set up Play Store for full Android compatibility

Ubuntu Touch has a very limited ecosystem compared to F-droid, but might be enough for someone willing to do most tasks in a browser.

Stuff like phone calls, pictures, sms, podcasts, music, and other simple tasks will work equally well on either OS assuming your device is supported

My bad it’s a 3a

I wonder why test this on an 11 year old phone?

I have it running on a Pixel 3a and it’s definitely smooth, but it still stutters once in a while. It feels slower than Android to me, but not much.

Battery life is indeed excellent, though mine doesnt seem to fast charge.

The camera app was the standout feature to me. The pictures i take look every bit as good as those from Android. I expected the app to be clunky or to have bad colors, but that is not the case at all.

Edit: Pixel 3a not 3

Sorry to be off-topic but I’m curious:

How/why do people use proton-ge?

Are you using it standalone? Through Lutris or Steam? Something else?

What are the situations you’d need it over vanilla proton? Do you keep both vanilla and ge installed?

Also, do improvements generally get added to vanilla, or is ge an increasingly-divergent fork?

I’ve been gaming primarily on Linux for over a decade and since it’s been an option I’ve used proton on steam extensively, but I’ve never tried ge

I built a backup server out of my old desktop, running Ubuntu and ZFS

I have a dataset for each of my computers and i back them up to the corresponding datasets in the zfs pool on the server semi-regularly. The zfs pool has enough disks for some redundancy, so i can handle occasional drive failures. My other computers run arbitrary filesystems (ext4, btrfs, rarely ntfs)

the only problem with my current setup is that if there is file degradation on my workstation that i dont notice, it might get backed up to the server by mistake. then a degraded file might overwrite a non-degraded backup. to avoid this, i generally dont overwrite files when i backup. since 90% of my data is pictures, it’s not a big deal since they dont change

Someday i’d like to set up proxmox and virtualize everything, and i’d also like to set up something offsite i could zfs-send to as a second backup

i never liked the inconsistent window management though.

On 8, (i dont remember for 8.1) there were some apps and menus that forced “tablet mode” and could only be interacted with in fullscreen. Other applications would open in what looked like tablet mode by default but you could break them out into desktop mode, after which they behaved normally.

“Green Is My Pepper”

https://github.com/torvoltos/gimp

The “phone-native” theoretical new user may become more of a real thing in the future too. When GNOME and Pantheon started developing in that direction I thought they were chasing ghosts, but now it turns out they may have just been a decade ahead of their time.

I don’t think the snap argument is without merit, I just think it’s an argument only had by a very technical subset of users. I think your comment illustrates that.

I don’t agree that anybody would be left “orphaned” on Ubuntu. LXD vs Podman is again a very technical question for a specific subset of users.

I also don’t agree that SteamOS is the goal for compatibility and support. Compatibility is best with Ubuntu, it’s the most widely deployed and used desktop distribution by far. Most other desktop distros are a rounding error when compared to Ubuntu user-wise.

I’ve also personally had a buggy experience with SteamOS. I wouldn’t use it as a desktop in its current state, but I’m aware some folks do just that.

For someone new to Linux who just needs to get on with their desktop work, Ubuntu is the best distro there is (flawed as it may be). Mint is also a good choice for the same reasons.

That sounds like another good solution!

Re: Discord

You can edit a text file to get it to stop checking for updates. IDK if this is viable on Debian but on Fedora it was never more than 1 update behind so I never had an issue in years

I think it’s on the Archwiki, but it applies to any Linux

Hardware support is also two-sided.

For example: game controllers.

On Linux, any first-party Switch, Playstation, or Xbox controller works out of the box. Most 3rd party controllers also work out of the box. Even Wii remotes work once paired over bluetooth (and the pointing works but takes some setup).

On windows, xbox controllers work out of the box, except for very old ones which require a driver. 3rd party pc controllers will tend to work out of the box (or sometimes with a driver), but wired Switch and Playstation controllers need hacky workarounds to work or to get full functionality. Wireless controllers can often be paired with bluetooth, but I’ve had hit and miss luck with windows and first party Sony/Nintendo controllers

Don’t use an immutable distro like endless or silverblue. It’s a whole new paradigm to learn (in addition to learning Linux basics). You should get your feet wet with something more user-friendly first.

My big recommendation is Ubuntu. Normal ubuntu. Not one of the flavors or derivatives. It’s got everything you need, plus very easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. Try to avoid using the command line when following guides online, there is nothing on Ubuntu you actually need it for and the graphical tools are very good.

Don’t listen to the complaining about snaps. You won’t notice them, they won’t affect you negatively, they are designed to just set and forget. The complaints come from a highly particular and technical subset of the Linux community.

If you really don’t like the look of Ubuntu, then I’d second all the recommendations for Mint. Those two distros have the most number of non-technical users in their communities because they are both very user-friendly and well-tested. I’d recommend against trying anything else until you’ve gotten comfortable with Ubuntu or Mint.

There are quite a few niche window managers and desktop environments that it’d be a shame to loose. I’m quite fond of Windowmaker (and curious about Afterstep), Trinity DE, and NSCDE for example, and I’m not aware of Wayland plans for any of them.

Looking Glass is apparently broken on GNOME + Wayland in this exact way.

Ideally there would be a bare minimum server side decoration for Wayland apps (like Looking Glass) that don’t provide any CSD. Hopefully that’s on the horizon if it’s not what’s being discussed here.

Couldn’t finish it: too much whining, not enough substance.

I haven’t tried hyprland yet but if this is the guy developing it than maybe I’m good.

Cosmic seems promising. Best of luck to system76, happy to see an alternative opinionated desktop getting some momentum.

I had no issues with compatibility, just made sure to save documents to older microsoft office formats in the hopes of avoiding issues.

I never had to use an exam browser or anything like that, I’d imagine you’d want to have a polite conversation with the instructor if that were to occur, perhaps they can make an exception or allow you to do it on a library computer

Collaboration was always over google docs, so there were never any problems working with others. My CS classes were all expected to be done in Linux VMs so that was sort of ideal. Other science/humanities classes were totally software-agnostic.

RAID 5/6 aren’t yet recommended for general use on BTRFS by the developers.

Other than that I agree it should be suitable for anything, and an improvement over ext4 in some situations.

If you don’t know what RAID 5/6 is you are good.

I guess I’m smart enough to install opensuse, but dumb enough that I somehow got slow pacman.

I kid you not, on my hardware zypper is the fastest between ubuntu apt, fedora dnf, and arch pacman. dnf was the second-fastest on my hardware, with apt and pacman being pretty sluggish

I’ve also used portage which was even slower, but probably not a fair comparison considering how much more complex it is.

Wow I must be doing something wrong, zypper has always been faster for me than pacman, both on my newer desktop and my older laptop