Admittedly I tend to always see as a bad thing whenever I see phone models without headphone jacks, that said for the last five years I’ve been using phones without headphone jacks and using the wired headphones they came with is enough for the few times I need to use them.

There are just two subs I check about once every two days, but I’m yet to log in again after I disconnected my account last month. I used to only visit it through Libreddit as the UX is better anyway but now that one’s gone too…

For me it was quite a different journey, I started a few years ago by bumping approximately at the same time in r/declutter and r/zerowaste, which even though might seem to be contrasting (and I would be lying if I said that I had and occasionally have problems in balancing the two mindsets!) I still argue that there’s an overlap, with decluttering being for me a prerequisite towards a lower-impact lifestyle and the latter helping to maintain a clutter-free living space.

From a more environmentally conscious lifestyle then came the interest in simple living, and only from there I started reading more about minimalism. All of those things resonate a lot with me and with the life I want to live (also because I had mostly the opposite examples growing up, and I took too much time to realize how badly it influenced me), although I generally don’t consider myself a minimalist. It’s more that I have my definition of what “simple living” means to me and having less stuff means to having less to worry about - so, yes, I agree in feeling that they are interconnected, but I don’t think minimalism can be a goal in itself.

That said, a big part of the reason why I’m interested in all of these four themes is essentially political: to not cave in to a society designed towards making us consume (with all of its social and environmental implications). And on a more personal side of things, my definition of simple living, as an atheist and materialist, in the philosophical sense of the term, is that my life will always be shorter than I want, thus having less unimportant stuff, less distractions is to me an imperative in order to make the most out of this short time.

Thunderbird on the desktop; K-9 Mail on Android.

Definitely not, first of all I love pastel colors and, on the more practical side of things, at least for touch interfaces I do prefer to have some padding: even on larger screens (my current phone is 6.7") I tend to prefer larger and more padded interfaces to avoid hitting the wrong one (and that’s the main reason why I don’t like to type on a phone that much).

So I might even be in the minority but having a control center with larger but less buttons on each page is exactly what I prefer, I don’t mind having to scroll if it’s easier to toggle what I need to.

I agree, also the holding back of packages just for the sake of waiting probably doesn’t make it more stable, despite what the devs say; also having 300+ packages updated at the same time might make it worse for troubleshooting in case something goes wrong.

As someone who actually started with Manjaro back in 2020 before moving to EndeavourOS after 9 months, I would say that there is indeed a steeper learning curve as you don’t get for example a GUI package manager (Pamac is awful and even as a newbie I used it for maybe three days before I started to use the CLI, but a Linux beginner might want one) and the fact it is a true rolling release means you need to do some more research and maintenance, so I wouldn’t call Endeavour a distro for absolute beginners, unless one is determined to learn a lot about how a computer works… but again one shouldn’t probably use a rolling release then; Manjaro just tricks you to believe it is easier, but it probably is only if you don’t use the AUR.

Maybe Garuda is more beginner friendly than EndeavourOS while avoiding most of the problems Manjaro has? Although I’ve never used it as I don’t see any advantage over Endeavour, and I’m not a fan of excessive out of the box theming and Chaotic AUR enabled as default…

Wow, I’ve never even used Sync but from the screenshot of the Reddit app on Google Play it’s one of those UIs so good that make you want to use it. I’m currently fine with the Lemmy PWA but the more feature-complete Reddit apps that get “ported” to be used with Lemmy the better, especially to ease the transition for new users.

Couldn’t agree more, two years ago I was gifted a small wireless speaker which works fine and everything but I sometimes even forget to charge it because its cable is a 15cm short USB-A to Micro-USB one which somehow is the only Micro-USB cable I have left at home as I didn’t have any other device with that port in years and I had thrown away a few cables when I last moved. Now whenever I am looking for a new electronic device USB-C is one of the first things I check and it’s a deal breaker for me.

Manjaro was the first Linux distro I used as a daily driver, from October 2020 to July 2021, when I switched to EndeavourOS. To be fair the main reason I switched was all those previous mess-ups by the developers and the troubled past, which I didn’t know of when I moved to Linux. In the year or so I used it, I didn’t have any messed update or crash myself.

I would say it’s still a fine distro for beginners who want to try a rolling release (as EndeavourOS is imho better in every way, but it doesn’t come with any GUI package manager so I wouldn’t call it a distro for absolute beginners), but can’t see any other usage case, as it’s especially risky if you want to use packages from the AUR.

LibreOffice, as I’ve been using it from soon after it was forked from OpenOffice and I’m used to it, and I don’t think it’s worth it to learn how to use another office suite when the one I use works fine for everything I need to do. I had tried OnlyOffice on another computer and I was positively impressed, but not quite enough to feel I should switch; in the end I only even use a small subset of the features LO has.

Just a few days ago I had commented elsewhere that, disappointed with recent Brave Search results, I should have used a meta search engine instead. Thanks to your post I stopped procrastinating and started trying a SearXNG instance as default search engine (just tweaking engine settings a bit), so far everything seems good, results are on point and in multiple languages (last time I had tried a meta search engine a few years ago I had to change manually the language for each search, and it was annoying given that I often search the web in at least three languages, sometimes four) and the uncluttered UI is very nice. I’ll test it out for a few days I guess, but the first impression is good.

Kvæsitso with default icons on Motorola Edge 30 Pro.

I was an iOS user for nearly a decade but I increasingly grew tired of the walled garden and lack of customization (i.e. not being possible for me to tailor the OS closer to my needs), especially the lack of third-party stores for FOSS apps. Not to mention the fact that the App Store model actively discourages developers of these apps, so it is an ideological question at the end of the day.

Congratulations! I’m about to try to get a professional assessment, although in the particular region of Italy where I live it’s a long process for adults that involves getting appointments with two doctors before going to the “Regional Autism Centre”. That has discouraged me for quite some time but this sort of limbo sometimes is hard to bear and now I just want to know it for certain…

Motorola Edge 30 Pro (aka Motorola Edge+ 2022 for the North Americans here), which I got back in early November last year. I did research for a while before buying it (and got it with a huge discount) and I’m mostly happy with my purchase, it’s a nice phone with a clean near-stock Android experience (although I’ve since changed launcher to Kvæsitso) and it’s extremely fast, although I must say I’m not a heavy smartphone user.

Worst things are that the Android 13 update took nearly three months long than planned to come (and here in Italy apparently we were among the first to get the update) and Motorola is not that fast with security updates; while the only really annoying thing is that sometimes it stops the internet connection usually after giving the command to download/update apps, whether from the Play Store or from F-Droid; the connection somehow is still there as it’s enough to cancel and tell do download/update again and everything works.

This is my first Android phone: my first smartphone was a Nokia X6 running Symbian which I got in 2011 and then I used iPhones for a decade (while having been a Mac user all the time), first an iPhone 5C in 2013 and then an 8 Plus which I got in 2018. Clearly the newest was the best of the bunch as it was a quite major upgrade from the 5C, which in turn came when Symbian was an abandoned OS; the last two phones both lasted me just short of five years, and I changed back in November mainly because I could hand it down (refurbished) to my mom, otherwise I would have waited perhaps another year.

This time I decided to leave iOS for good as I was increasingly unsatisfied and worried with Apple’s walled garden ecosystem - for the same reason I had already left macOS for Linux back in 2020 (never had any other Apple products nor subscriptions except for a few iPods over the years) - and even after the novelty has worn off I vastly prefer Android. Right now I have this Android phone and my laptop I’m writing from, which only runs Linux, specifically EndeavourOS, although my old 2009 iMac still works - thanks to a SSD swap back in '17, although it hasn’t gotten newer updates since High Sierra - and I tinker with it from time to time. At work I use Windows 10… but that’s not my choice.

Brave Search on all my personal devices, even though I’m getting worse results than up to a few months ago, so as much as it pains to admit it I sometimes use Google as a fallback (and the last time I actually used Google as my main search engine was back in 2012!). I probably should use metasearch engines more, though, but have been procrastinating learning how to effectively use them for a while now.

Aside from that, I have about a dozen sites saved with search keywords on Firefox (four of them are Wikipedia in different languages, though) that I use all the time.

Wow, glad I’m not the only one who had that impression. I have been using Brave Search for about half a year now and rarely had any problems finding what I was looking for, then eventually I started getting mostly older results, sometimes not even on topic.

I use the following ones (on Firefox), except for uBO the others are just for conveniency:

• Bitwarden
• Gesturefy (for some time from early 2021 to late 2022 I used to use Vivaldi as my primary browser and now if I’m using a mouse, not having gestures in a browser feels odd…)
• LibRedirect
• Plasma Integration
• uBlock Origin (middle mode and with some additional lists)
• User-Agent Switcher and Manager (if I find a site that says it doesn’t work with Firefox).

• AntennaPod (podcast player)
• Authenticator Pro (2FA)
• Aves (gallery)
• Bitwarden
• Catima (for stores’ reward cards)
• Etar (calendar)
• Geometric Weather
• Infinity for Reddit… as long as it works
• Joplin (note-taking software, synced with the desktop client)
• K-9 Mail
• Kvæsitso (launcher)
• Mull (Firefox fork)
• NetGuard (works in the background as a VPN to block network access to certain apps, for example I use it to block every network connection by Gboard)
• NewPipe
• Simple File Manager
• Tasks.org