Maybe they fixed that part, but that isn’t a good thing. Now you can’t feel whether something is installed as snap and will probably run into snap issues without a clue what could be causing them.

Copied from another comment I wrote about that:

Because snaps are terrible. They constantly break parts of apps for no reason. If you have container issues with a flatpak, just use flatseal to punch a hole through the container. With snaps, people will tell you to install the non-snap version because that’s easier than beating snap into submission. I learned that the hard way when I had a university project with kubernetes and docker was installed as a snap. I spent way too much time trying to make it work at all before giving up and switching to a VM on my work laptop where it went surprisingly smooth without snaps.

Flatpaks are better in every way and since this isn’t about money, we should all just move on and use the best tool for the job.

But what does canonical think should happen when you run sudo apt install firefox and press Y? That’s right, you now have firefox as a snap. Have fun waiting for 5 seconds every time you start it.

Shit like that scares new users away from linux as a whole

Something like mint or fedora is just as easy to install and has less issues than ubuntu (snaps)

Use something other than gnome and, while you’re at it, you might as well use something other than ubuntu.

KDE is very hard to break, you can go wild with customization there.

The boost app has a karma counter, maybe people want to see the funny number go up.

Installing arch is a great way to learn. Also don’t be scared of daily driving it, it’s not like it breaks twice a week. More like once a year, which is better than ubuntu in my experience.

Gorilla Glass Victus is just a marketing term. It’s still glass, and glass breaks (and gets scratched). Always use a screen protector. If your phone has curved edges on the front, a case is also mandatory because curved screens are very easy to break.

I know a lot of people my age (early 20s) who use tiktok and have no idea what tracking or privacy mean.

Kids might be smart, but if this is all they’ve known and it works well enough they don’t pay attention and don’t use their critical thinking.

But the deck can also be used for gaming with zero tinkering, so kids will do that.

KDEs wobbly windows will convert almost any child to linux.

Which distro and GPU? I’ve had a terrible experience with my 1070 Ti across Windows, kubuntu and arch and I didn’t even try Wayland.

Nvidia driver updates break things all the time. Just rollback and wait a few weeks before you try updating again.

It was already discovered that that was a big and game devs need to fix it manually for now.

Thanks, I’ve been looking for a comparison like that but search engines have just gotten ridiculously bad. /e/ slacking on the webview updates is interesting and steers me away from it.

I’m leaning towards the fairphone right now because it’s cheaper at 256GB and not smaller than my current phone. DivestOS looks like it does most of what grapheneOS would do for me.

As always: If your phone is still fine to use, that’s a question worth asking. But if it’s no longer getting security updates or there’s another reason to not use it anymore, save yourself the hassle and buy a new one now.

Buying old android phones used to be a no-go because of the very limited update period, but the S23 will get 5 years so that’s fine.

Not sure of what prices are like in the UK. Over here in germany I usually use geizhals.de to check trends. They also have the geizhals.eu site, which just shows german stuff for me. Maybe they also have UK prices.

Yes and it isn’t rated IPX7 for that reason, just IP55. I wouldn’t hold it under the faucet but it should be perfectly fine for daily use.

Fun fact: It’s still entirely possible to make a phone water resistant even if it has a removable back. Samsung did it in 2014 with the S5. Glass backs are just there to make it easier to break a phone, not for any technical reason.

I already have Osmand and while it’s a great offline map, it can’t pick the fastest route for me every single day.

If you wrote good code, even a caveman would understand it.

The SOC exposes most things to the OS afaik so that’s the most important part that needs to match. To make a custom ROM, you’d need some code from qualcomm for the SOC. They only maintain that for a very short time, which is the main reason why android phones in the past have been so terrible in terms of updates, only getting 2-3 of support. Making a ROM without that stuff is so much work that not even phone manufacturers do it.

The G5S has a Snapdragon 430 which is ancient at this point, so you probably won’t get any recent version of android running on there. You shouldn’t run an old version either as those are insecure.

That said, maybe GSIs are an option. Those are basically ROMs that work on multiple devices and a few years ago, google made it a requirement for phones to be able to boot a GSI in order to get certified to be shipped with google apps. Not entirely sure about when that started, so the G5S might be to old.

I googled a bit and didn’t find anything concrete for that device, but GSIs are generic so you could have luck installing one for the snapdragon 430. During the early days of LOS GSIs, there were a lot of problems with wifi and cellular so you’ll have to try a few builds before you find one that works.

GSIs always need to be clean flashed, so wipe all partitions except vendor before you flash the ROM.

You’re storing unencrypted data on google drive with those backups, so they scan all of your chats. Whether they just look for malware/CSAM or people manually look through your chats is something you’ll never know.