Lineage gives you a decent app ecosystem (F-droid) with the option to set up Play Store for full Android compatibility

Ubuntu Touch has a very limited ecosystem compared to F-droid, but might be enough for someone willing to do most tasks in a browser.

Stuff like phone calls, pictures, sms, podcasts, music, and other simple tasks will work equally well on either OS assuming your device is supported

My bad it’s a 3a

I wonder why test this on an 11 year old phone?

I have it running on a Pixel 3a and it’s definitely smooth, but it still stutters once in a while. It feels slower than Android to me, but not much.

Battery life is indeed excellent, though mine doesnt seem to fast charge.

The camera app was the standout feature to me. The pictures i take look every bit as good as those from Android. I expected the app to be clunky or to have bad colors, but that is not the case at all.

Edit: Pixel 3a not 3

Good counterpoint

I just don’t see the draw of immutable distros for non power users.

With traditional ubuntu/mint/fedora you have 15+ years of forum posts, tutorials, and community wisdom to help you out if you get stuck. You probably wont need to, but it’s nice to be able to just google something and get a dozen good answers. If you want to use containerized apps you also have that option.

Also depending on your taste in gaming, you might need access to stuff outside of steam/lutris/heroic/flathub. In those cases getting your game working could be a bit of a hassle compared to a traditional distro.

I totally see how immutability can be a draw for tinkerers and developers, but for regular users it’s solving a problem that doesn’t really exist, or is pretty rare if it does.

I also think there is something to say for picking a distro that’s been around a long while. Hopefully Bazzite is still around in 10 years. I feel very confident Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/Pop! still will be.

That said, I’m glad to hear you and your friend are happy with Bazzite. It seems like a really good option if you only play games from steam/heroic/lutris/flathub. A best of both worlds between a PC and a gaming console.

make the most use of the hardware

All distros should do this equally well, and better than Windows

let me play the most games

All distros will be more or less the same. Games generally work or they dont. Check ProtonDB to see which games work and how well.

easiest to use

lowest maintenance possible

This is how distros actually differ.

Some common suggestions:

Ubuntu LTS:

• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• GNOME shell environment is very beautiful and fast, but very different from Windows

Kubuntu LTS:

• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• KDE Plasma Desktop is like all the best parts of windows 95/xp/7/10/11 + os9/OSX/macOS combined, improved, and made super customizeable

Ubuntu/Kubuntu current:

• Upgrade your OS every 6 months
• Newer software than LTS
• Otherwise same as LTS

Linux Mint:

• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• Cinnamon Desktop is a better looking and faster implementation of a Windows 7 style desktop

Fedora

• Upgrade your OS every 9 months (or else)
• Proprietary codecs need to be added after install to play some video and music streams in your browser. It’s like 3 commands copy/pasted into the terminal
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• Choice of several desktop environments (Fedora spins)

Pop!_OS

• Fun to spell
• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• Pop_shell makes you feel like a hacker from the future, but is very unlike Windows

I do not reccomend Bazzite, Kali, Arch, Manjaro, Garuda, Debian, or Slackware. They are all great distros for specific use-cases, but they are all significantly more work to configure and/or maintain than the suggestions i’ve outlined.

I haven’t tried Nobara so i cant recommend it, but from the outside it looks fine for a gaming desktop.

Edit: I have mixed feelings on Bazzite, but it might also be a good option for someone feeling adventurous

Not the 12 afaik

I’ve mainly used an iPhone 13 and a Pixel 7 pro for comparison, but both have consistently worse cameras than the 6T.

I mostly take close-up photos of plants for iNaturalist, and with both the iPhone and the Pixel i have a very hard time getting it to focus on the right spot long enough to get a good photo. The 6T is much better at maintaining the correct focus IME than either newer phone.

Both the Pixel and the iPhone will frequently try to refocus on something in the background just as I’m framing the shot. I have a third-party camera on the pixel with “manual” focus, but it’s not as easy to use as the OP6T. The iPhone is less bad about random focus changes if i’m taking a picture of a flower in good light, but leaves and stems frequently give me trouble.

I also prefer the color balance on the OP6T to that on the Pixel or iPhone. Much more true to life IMO

My 6t was the best Android i ever had. I still havent found a smartphone with a better camera than that one (including modern iPhones and Pixels).

Too bad about the Oppo merger ruining a lot of what made Oneplus good. The lack of support for loading alternative roms was the final straw for me. I dont want to be chained to the very short device lifespan the manufacturer supports.

I built a backup server out of my old desktop, running Ubuntu and ZFS

I have a dataset for each of my computers and i back them up to the corresponding datasets in the zfs pool on the server semi-regularly. The zfs pool has enough disks for some redundancy, so i can handle occasional drive failures. My other computers run arbitrary filesystems (ext4, btrfs, rarely ntfs)

the only problem with my current setup is that if there is file degradation on my workstation that i dont notice, it might get backed up to the server by mistake. then a degraded file might overwrite a non-degraded backup. to avoid this, i generally dont overwrite files when i backup. since 90% of my data is pictures, it’s not a big deal since they dont change

Someday i’d like to set up proxmox and virtualize everything, and i’d also like to set up something offsite i could zfs-send to as a second backup