Oh, these are new ones for me! Semiosis sounds interesting.

Should I read Revelation Space before beginning? Reynolds has been on my list for a while, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.

I would love to find a good series for the summer! Dune is a great escape.

I’m currently reading “Les plus jeunes années du monde” by Marie-Lorna Vaconsin, which seems really promising and worth the wait for a translation if you don’t read French. Trees around the world suddenly start glowing red due to a new form of photo synthesis, and the people close to the events make sure every page is interesting and surprising.

I’ve recently read:

• Dungeon Crawler Carl 8. I was entertained by yet another wave of chaos.

• “Heureux comme jamais” by Guillaume Chamanadjian, an easy to read satire about a space ship full of rich and entitled people not really caring whether or not they are the last people in the universe.

• “Automatic Noodle” by Annalee Newitz, about a kitchen crew of robots. Very cozy and easy read.

• “There is no antimemetics division” by qntm. Short, scary and thrilling. I would go into it without reading too much about it. It is so well thought out, and I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone about this gem of a book.

• “Murder by memory” by Olivia Waite. A cozy murder mystery set on a generational ship. This is a sweet book if all you want is a break for your brain, a bit like “Automatic Noodle”.

• “A Cantlicle For Leibowitz” by Walter Miller. This is a classic that is still worth reading. The monks of a monastery preserves knowledge while the rest of the world struggles after a devastating event. So beautifully written, and surprisingly funny as well.

Wow, thank you for these tips and suggestions! The salami sticks sound really interesting. Thank you also for the warning about the stores, we will be visiting some smaller towns too.

My Fairphone 5, because it has allowed me to break free from Google and other big tech companies by letting me install whatever I want on it.

And my good old Thinkpad.

Welcome! It feels good to be more free. Highly recommend.

You could do something like that with Ubuntu Touch, but why waste the battery life and money on a smart phone when you can do this with a feature phone?

• Blogs/sites like Pitchfork for internationally hyped releases
• Smaller sites for more local content
• I check local calendars for release parties or concerts
• I talk with my colleagues.
• I go directly to labels that I trust and check out all of their new releases
• I stop by my local record stores and ask the staff for a couple of album recs
• I use the search functions of Bandcamp and follow a bunch of bands there
• Ditto for Soundcloud, where the reposts of independent artists are especially useful for discovering other bands and musicians.
• Recommendations from Qobuz or Spotify
• I have a couple of radio stations that I spend a few hours with each week, like fip.fr, local student radio, local insert political leanings radio

Some people use it proudly about themselves, but if somebody who doesn’t love and respect you use it about you, it can be an insult.

Oh my, how did I miss this. Thank you!

Reading Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts. I’m not that far in yet, but the world building is really fascinating. It seems like such a beautiful yet creepy future for human kind.

I hear these two guys while listening to the curling matches during the olympics. Yup yup yup!

Keep the rule as it is, and take those kinds of discussions in communities meant for political discussion. There’s already enough of US politics everywhere else.

While your model may not be supported now, it may be in the future. I would join some of the communities that make custom roms and operating systems and lurk a bit to see if someone is doing a port to your phone and are near the stage where they need testers.

Look at deGoogle guides to see what you can do to make your phone safer in the mean time. Every little bit can help you be more secure.

The Waydroid container runs Lineage, a degoogled android based os. Many apps require Google play services to run, or they do other checks that fail in that environement. Most stuff from F-droid will run.

Signal does not have a native UT app at the moment, but some use Matrix bridges to send and receive messages. Others run it in Waydroid, or do experiments with the cli version. The first works very well, but you need to find/make a bridge host that you trust.

Oh, it feels very nice to use! Most of my troubles these days stem from me experimenting and running the devel version of the os. I can go days between serious issues, and the issues that do appear are never deal breakers as they don’t tend to affect basic phone functionality. It feels great and it is way too much fun.

Why I love it:

• I love the UI. Quick, intuitive and good looking.
• Basic functions are good. The phone works well as a phone, with calls (including VoLTE for a number of newer models now), SMS, MMS, wifi hotspot ++ working
• The amount of native apps is pleasing to me. Of course, you won’t get the usual proprietary big tech developed apps, but other basics are there.
• The flexibility is awesome. You can install apps from the Open Store built especially for UT, Snaps (not all of which are meant for small screens with touch input, but you get to try it and decide for yourself if you can make it work), nix packages, installing stuff in libertine containers, AND Android apps in a Waydroid container.
• The community is extremely helpful and diverse.
• The two previous points, community + flexibility, helps whenever you miss one of the larger apps. Miss Telegram? Meet the native app Teleports! Miss Signal? The community can give you several options. WhatsApp? Of course some generous soul has made a UT adapted web app that you can use in stead.
• I finally feel free. I own my device, and the software I run on it doesn’t feel invading or dishonest.

What is sometimes difficult:

• I need to be honest about the browser situation. The default browser has a nice UI, but it is very outdated. There is a lot of improvements going on behind the scenes, but the new version is not ready for launch yet. The alternatives are UT adapted versions of Librewolf and Firefox, but they are both in an alpha state.
• VoLTE only works for some of the supported phones, and it is still considered experimental.
• Banking and ID verification apps have almost no UT native solutions, and running them in Waydroid is very hit and miss.
• General stability. There are more bugs and crashes here than in Android/iOS.

I daily drive Ubuntu touch and like it very much, but I can see how that would be hard in certain situations. Keep doing some research, and pick one that seems to fit your needs to try it out! Only you can decide if it is good enough for your particular circumstances.

I grew up with my brother throwing used computer parts on my bed whenever he upgraded something, in case I wanted to reuse them. He also gave me a copy of Windows 98, and later XP that I reused every time I did a major hw upgrade. But one day the XP CD-rom was just too old, but I was too young to start working and had no money, and so Linux came into my life.

I wouldn’t do Ubuntu Touch on the P3a if you’re in an area where VoLTE is required. It seems this model is too old to get the treatment it needs.