Exactly. I’m now on 4 years old Samsung S10e, with replaced battery and display, because I can’t see myself using ANY of the new phones. All of them are so giant and heavy, and I already feel like I’d like something smaller than my current one… I guess the Fairphone philosophy wins anyway, hehe.

Well, it depends what you imagine “general purpose computing” is. Android OS is primarily targeted at phones, with specific set of requirements, so I don’t think it can ever match desktop OSes, without major sacrifices from the both worlds.

What exactly is getting bastardized? Phones never had 2 USB ports. And there are still new phones with headphone jack (Zenphone 10 comes to my mind). Yes, many brands dropped it, but it’s not a conspiracy (or at lest doesn’t have to be), it’s just basic economics.

I can’t relate at all. My phone is a PHONE, with options of short-term entertainment. I have other devices for other “computery” activities. I personally almost never use even my single USB-C port, thanks to wireless charging and wireless headphones. Sounds like your phone is your main device.

This is one of the rare instances when I’m glad I have Samsung with their custom UI. I have to sometimes use a Pixel phone, and those new Android 12 settings tiles overall are just mind-boggling. It feels like a change just for the sake of change, ordered by marketing department or something.

Sounds neat. But what all the services that require proprietary app? Like banking, Uber, reviews on Google Maps etc.?

This really needs a screen recording of it in action.

This is such a stupid minor thing, but it’s what made me switch from Ubuntu to Fedora, haha.

Fedora uses DNF, with rpms under the hood, not sure how that works, haha. Honestly I have no problems with it. I’m no power user, but it does everything I need. The only downside being kinda slow repo fetches.

I use many extensions, but I also like this “keep the vanilla simple” approach of Gnome. Instead of trying to support many different workflows, it does only one, and it does it well. Everything is much more polished, compared to other DEs, simply because there’s less stuff. And support for extensions seems to be excellent, since there’s so many of them and they often work very well.

Updating is not too bad, as long as you don’t update as soon as new major Gnome version is available. I usually wait a few months, and by then all extensions are either updated, replaced by a fork, or obsolete.

the only way I can think of to know which apps are in the background of that workspace is to memorize it

If you press Meta key and scroll, it shows all windows in each workspace. I think that’s also in vanilla, not one of my many extensions, haha.