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Not being able to run Signal on my Android tablet feels really inconvenient. That would be no. 1 on my wish list

Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me

I use Fedora Silverblue personally (feels rock-solid and borderline impossible to mess up), but you might want to get more familiar with the basics before getting into immutable distros. I’d echo what everyone else is saying and do Linux Mint first

Also insanely unhealthy to consume stuff like this on a day-to-day basis

Just mpv for me. Simplest and most versatile option

The Pixel Tablet can run GrapheneOS, which is the best stock Android alternative IMO

The US has a pretty severe urban / rural divide in most of its states, but I don’t think it’s enough. You’d usually need a pretty clean split along territorial lines for that.

Minus the sandboxing and security improvements, apparently

I could handle an overpriced phone if the device were viable for day-to-day use. Unfortunately the battery life is so compromised that even if we had a totally flawless mobile OS running on it, it still wouldn’t work out as a phone.

In this case it’s better to think of it as a development platform.

You could argue that China has devolved into a totalitarian state under Xi. There’s a lot of corruption surrounding the party’s Ministry of Railways, which has led to some perverse incentives to invest (possibly way too much) in HSR and urban metro networks across all of the country. And thanks to the extremely centralized power structure, you have a lot of standardized components used to roll out those networks, making construction cheaper and faster due to economies of scale.

Tldr; China’s rail infra is pretty great, especially when so many of its cities are very rough around the edges otherwise. That said, East Asia’s democracies (Taiwan, S. Korea and Japan) also have excellent transportation networks, so who knows.

What’s the advantage vs. the current version?

Also looks like it’s removing an important visual affordance (i.e., which areas you can click to drag the window), unless I’m misinterpreting it

Basic functions like web browsing are borderline unusable on the OG pinephone, unfortunately. Still a fun device to hack away at, but I wouldn’t use it as a phone

No. Actors are participating in storytelling, and ‘evil’ characters are just an exercise in symbolism and mythmaking.

Usually it’s just one program per virtual desktop, and maybe a second (briefly) for one-off terminal commands, etc.

The whole point for me is to avoid wasting time moving a mouse around or manually manipulating anything.

Is that an argument in favor of glued-in batteries, though? A lot of users’ phones aren’t going to make it for six years if it’s non-trivial (or impossible) to swap out the battery for a new one.

I’d only set one up if it were fully open-source and self-hosted. It looks like there are a couple of options out there that meet those criteria (like Mycroft), but I haven’t looked into it enough yet.

Having both that and Waydroid on a phone would be pretty great. You might want to check out Darling for running Mac apps on Linux in the meantime, since its goals are similar to Wine’s (but it’s still early in development in comparison)

Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we’re getting close to having at least one that’s usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.

Running pmOS on a oneplus 6 right now- feels painfully close to being daily-drivable, and the performance / battery life makes it much more usable than an OG pinephone.

Calls and SMS aren’t fully there yet, and the camera doesn’t work. Mobile data is fine, while Waydroid fills in most missing apps, aside from music and video streaming (since audio still stutters on Android apps). So for now I’m also stuck carrying an old Android around for day-to-day basics, and offloading as much as I can onto the OP6.