Isn’t the VollaPhone Quintus the best option for Ubuntu Touch? (It’s more expensive than the Fair Phone, but it ships with UT)

https://volla.online/en/index.php

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I’d argue that Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish are the most mature offerings. Both OSs are (or at least were at some point) developed as commercially viable alternatives to the duopoly. That gives them a headstart in terms of apps and overall pollish.

The postmarket shells are catching up, but you still get instructions like “drag and drop a file from your file manager to open it”, which doesn’t work on a phone. Phone UX still seems like an afterthought in many cases.

Postmarket OS is a desktop Linux system, but for phones. UT and Sailfish on the other hand are mobile OSs, that happen to use much of the same tech as desktop Linux. They are therefore much closer to the duopoly (for bettet or for worse).

I found pipx the easiest way to install and manage a current ytdlp installation

sudo apt install pipx
pipx ensurepath

pipx install yt-dlp

Yes I know, it’s an additional package manager, but it actually is a package manager and will therefore ensure the setup is correct

Resolve is not available as a flatpak so distrobox would be your only option to get it running on a atomic distro.

But in general flatpaks are more secure than distrobox containers. Flatpaks are sandboxed. Apps can request access to different parts outside the sandbox through so called portals. Portals are basically like the permission system on your phone. But not all portals are finished yet so apps can get way more permissions in the name of user friendliness. There are third party tools like flatseal, that manage permissions though.

Distrobox on the other hand doesn’t have any of that. Apps can access your entire home directory and a bunch of other stuff if they want

And for resolve there is even a preconfigured container: https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox

You could replicate this workflow by replacing iCloud with Nextcloud and Time Machine with Timeshift.

The iOS app for Nextcloud allows the automatic upload of photos, you just need an account with a Nextcloud provider (or just host your own instance).

Timeshift is preinstalled on a bunch of distros, including Linux Mint, and can be installed on all other major ones. See https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift for details.

Turns out people need villains with faces. And the gaming industry wasn’t personable enough to truly hate.

Not necessarily. Both have their drawbacks. It takes longer for new hardware to be supported on Debian and setting up a Nvidia grafics card is more complicated

Distro: short for distribution. Linux is not an operating system. It’s a piece of technology (specifically something called a kernel) you can use to create an OS. Those Linux based OSs are referred to as distros. We are usually not calling them “Versions” because the Linux Kernel is also frequently seeing updates and that would just cause confusion.

Debian and Ubuntu: Popular distros. Ubuntu tends to be a bit more user friendly than Debian and was the default recommendation for new user for a long time. In recent years its popularity among enthusiasts declined because of a series of unpopular decisions, mainly the adaptation of something called snaps which is not completely open source and takes a bit more time to launch apps than alternatives. Debian on the other hand really values stability. Updates arrive less frequently than on other distros but undergo really rigorose testing.

You are right. I’ve corrected my comment

There’s also qobuz for your more mainstream music needs. And you can always use a YouTube downloaded like yt-dlp together with a music tagging tool like MusicBrainz Picard.

I could be completely wrong, but the fact, that you stated, that Telegram doesn’t receive messages without the tray icon leads me to believe that they are doing background services wrong. Because the status icon in the tray is supposed to be exactly that. The service itself shouldn’t be tied to that.

Is the new UI broken or are app developers just not implementing it into their apps or what’s wrong with the current situaltion?

Both, kinda. The new UI relies afaik on xdg-portals to get which apps are running in the background. Therefore only flatpaks should show up; but they should show up automatically, without any tweaks by the devs.

Also the UI only displays that an app is running in the background. It can’t communicate any type of status information.

I stand corrected

The Linux support of Snapdragon SOCs for desktops and laptops is unfortunately severely lacking. Qualcomm pledged to provide upstream divers, but then the Windows drivers turned out to be a mess and the Linux version had to wait. It is nowhere near production ready. Most of the hardware enablement work is currently as far as I can tell being done by German OEM Tuxedo Computers because they are working on a Snapdragon powered laptop that ships with Linux. But even their work was impacted by Qualcomm stalling (the linked blog article lists Christmas 2024 as their target release date and that didn’t happen).

There used to be a Kodi/XMBC skin for that but development on that seems to have been abandoned years ago.

Depending on your use case Kodi might be a better fit for your HTPC as it tightly integrates with Jellyfin and also has a Spotify plugin. And some skins work generally the way the xmb used to work - they just look very different

Linux is the third option. As far as many normies are concerned the second option is macOS

One thing to make your girlfriend’s transition easier: you can reconfigure the UI to be more similar to more recent versions of MS office. The first time you open it, there will be a popup that brings you directly to the relevant settings menu. It’s not one to one but the major options are going to be in similar places after you changed the UI.

Bazzite:

• Fedora based, so newer libraries
• Atomic updates, therefore doesn’t break on updates
• Steam and Lutris are preinstalled