My guess would be some value stability at all costs, others value user control, and others value uptime.

simple update and sleep should not result in a black screen on any OS IMO

That’s the thing. Different distros handle it in different ways. Some have the option to do offline updates so it will not actually install the update until after reboot so there is minimal risk of something interfering. That’s why often the recommendation is to try and find one that is more stable if that is what you value more.

Maybe there were dual booting Windows and then a Windows update broke the boot partition

Just out of curiosity, which distro did you end up using?

You could probably stretch it to 10-12 hours if you turn all the hardware kill switches to off, which activates “lockdown mode.” It turns off every sensor on the device.

I daily drive a Librem 5. First thing to note is do not expect a well polished experience. Battery life is bad, only about 4 hours of light use, and 8 or so hours if left in suspend. It can do VoLTE, send SMS, use web apps and any apps coded with libadwaita or kirigami. Other desktop apps can be forced to scale on the display, but it won’t be perfect.

I use Signal desktop as my main means of communication on the Librem 5. I have a spare normie phone for setup, but Waydroid is an option. I do use Waydroid for a few apps that have no web browser equivalent.

Idk, all I can say is, you have to really want it to live with it. I don’t do gaming or heavy social media use or anything removed that, so it is just fine for me. But it’s definitely not for everyone.

As someone dailying a Linux phone, I will say that there were no issues getting it to work on T-Mobile. The only thing I did was manually enter the APN details, but that was an OS thing.

From what I have seen on forums Verizon won’t let you at all, and AT&T might take a bit of work to get them to whitelist the IMEI on their network.

To answer your question about Android apps, there is an application called Waydroid that can run on Linux phones. This essentially emulates Android and you can install apps on there. Some Play Store apps require access to Google Play Services, and even though MicroG tries to emulate it without being as privacy invasive, it is not perfect and some apps won’t run well or even at all.

I only use it for a few things that do not have any way to access through a web browser.

Or for some reason you are an AI that thinks it’s a person.

People have already mentioned ProtonDB for games. Another website you can use for alternative versions of software is https://osalt.com/

That sucks about your friend. I can relate.

Scammers hacked my elderly mother on her windows laptop. They tricked her with an ad saying there was a problem with her computer, and they had her install remote access software. She mentioned seeing the terminal so I assumed they installed (at least) a keylogger. Luckily, they either ran out of time, or their con took two days, but they said they were going to call my mom the next day and have her log in to the bank to make sure her computer was still working.

So, I wiped her computer and installed Linux Mint with auto updates set up. She only had one simple question about logging in to google chrome and that’s been it for the last month. She has just been using it no problem.

Side note: The next day the scammers had the nerve to call my mom and ask her why her computer was turned off.

Welcome to a world outside of enshittification!

It’s cool you got to try out plasma mobile! I haven’t had the chance to try it myself, but I have been using phosh which works well too.

I remember it for the same reason. Pretty cool that the project is still going

If you want a nice looking distro with some interesting features try Nitrux: nxos.org

There can only be… NONE!

Looming back it was probably Windows XP as the last time I used Windows as my main OS. I switched not because Windows was enshittified like it is now, but because the FOSS movement sounded interesting to me. I loaded Ubuntu on an old laptop, and once I got drivers working it covered everything I needed besides gaming. As I became more of a casual player I used Windows less and less until now where I only use it at work. It’s been an interesting journey.

I like the default look of Nitrux

When the phone is not set to suspend, and mostly idle with a couple of apps running, and some occasional web browsing, its about 4 hours. Under similar conditions using suspend (meaning it will keep the modem powered and wake up the rest of the device wen receiving phone calls and SMS) then I can get through a 9 hour workday and have about 40% battery left.

I have been daily driving the phone for a couple of years so I’m sure the battery has degraded some, but I don’t know how much difference I would get with a new one. It can be easily replaced, so I may do that in the future.

It certainly shows the potential for mobile Linux for sure. There’s a project https://postmarketos.org where you can install their mobile Linux OS on Android phones if you want to give it a try on a spare phone or something. The wiki lists what phones the OS can be installed on and what hardware features are working for each device.