I am jealous. I live in Australia and because of where I live the only way to get anything symmetrical is enterprise Ethernet. As you can imagine, it is outrageously expensive. So I am stuck with 50 Mbps upload for the foreseeable future.

Yeah it was the sliding mechanism I was thinking of as a potential issue, not the actual keys themselves. Phones with keyboards that don’t slide seem ok, but I personally wouldn’t want one.

I am too young and missed this era of phones, but personally I don’t like the idea of slide out keyboards. They seem like they would be very prone to dirt clogging it up. Would it even be possible to get an IP68 rating with a slide out keyboard?

The one phone feature I miss most is the alert slider from the OnePlus 5T I had. The 3 position switch is so intuitive when it comes to putting the phone on vibrate or mute. It sucks that no other phones have it, as I vowed never to buy a OnePlus phone again due to them never selling phones officially in my country. That, the increase in price, the trend towards more mainstream conformity, and the software deficiencies really soured my opinions of OnePlus.

Well the thing is, for it to be viable for the average person it would need to be able to suit a lot of different use cases. A lot of systems and infrastructure would need to be built up as well, likely to the point where it starts to resemble currently available typical phone OSs. There would need to be consistency and some amount of stability in terms of APIs and such for app developers to use. Having fragmentation of the ecosystem (different distros), with low level differences (compared to just a manufacturer or carrier skin+apps), means that it will be more difficult for app developers to target all platforms.

So to some extent, I guess it is partly due to a lack of momentum, however it is impossible to ignore the extent to which the Linux way of doing things is going to hinder adoption.

And don’t forget that the Linux ecosystem has a habit of competing against itself for the little marketshare it does have. The fragmentation of the ecosystem also leads to work being done many times over for each distro. It makes it very hard for Linux to catch up and keep pace with the likes of Android and IOS.

I am not hating on Linux by any means, just being realistic about the situation.

It is definitely getting there (depending on the device), but there are still more than a few rough edges. Calls, SMS/MMS and data is working for the most part, still some bugs here and there. The biggest issues with calls, SMS and data tend to depend on the carrier and country.

On my Linux phone (FLX1) battery life tends to be good enough if not using android apps, and… acceptable if using android apps. It is definitely a phone you need to charge every night though. Audio tends to be OK, but isn’t configured out of the box to use USB audio.

Notifications tend to be my biggest problem with Linux phones at the moment, as they aren’t well handled by apps and software outside of SMS and missed calls. Installed apps tend to need to be open for notifications to go through.

Honestly, I don’t see Linux phones as being viable for the average person for quite a long time. But it is definitely possible to get by using it as your only phone.

Yeah, porting the kernel is the “easy” part for any OS. Its the user space and building up a software ecosystem for the new architecture that is a pain in the ass.

If you are following best practices, you would be using a device with a password (ideally full disk encryption, but whatever) to access the password manager in the first place. Using just biometrics to log into PC or phone is a bad idea. Most phones require a password/passcode for first unlock due to disk encryption.

Laughs in GrapheneOS and/or phone running Linux.

A big part of Broadcom’s current business model seems to be:

• Buy company that makes an important product/service used by many big companies.
• Squeeze the acquired company for every last drop of short term profit; increasing prices, abandoning products, etc.
• Watch large companies jump ship to other solutions
• Repeat

Elon is gonna lose. You can call it free speech, but Australia doesn’t have free speech.