Greetings, i have been using GOS on my phone for a week and its great. I am thinking about selling my laptop, that would leave me only with my phone. So, my question is, is there a possible situation that something happens on my phone that would require me to have a laptop/computer to solve which i am not going to have if i sell. Sorry if its a stupid question, i am not tech smart. Thanks!
Problem if only have phone?
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ryuki you're not the only one who thinks that way. I have been using just my phone for the last year without any issues. I don't have any special requirements of my setup and all this time my Linux PC has been parked in the loft. Just make sure you subscribe to stable updates to avoid any hiccups.
ryuki OTA updates apply to GOS as well and are done automatically by the updater. However, if an update fails then the only recovery option is to push an OTA update using a computer over ADB
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Keep your computer, it doesn't cost you anything to keep it.
Computers do alot of things that phones cannot, you just don't know about them because as you stated you're not "tech smart". Even though you have more tech smarts than alot of poeple which is why you're here.
At a very basic level it will allow you to have a device with additional backups of information incase your phone goes down. If you're phone goes you will have no other way to communiate, but if you had your laptop you can always still access and send out emails, check accounts, access your passwords, pay bills, etc. Also PC's are just better and faster than phones for things like writing documents, researching, so on and so fourth. Sometimes having a bigger screen and a faster way to input information (with all your fingers instead of two thumbs) is helpful.
If you don't care about any of these things, then use your PC to learn. If you weren't considerate of your privacy and security, you wouldn't be using GOS. So learn even more using your computer. You can learn how to use virtual machines, encrypt flash drives, use specialized operating systems, so on and so fourth. Try a linux distro (https://pop.system76.com/), it's "windows like" in the sense that it has a full GUI (you don't HAVE to use command line), but gives you the perks of things like full disk encryption, limited telemetry, etc.
Phones are first and foremost communication devices, they were never originally designed for being a massive entertainment or do all system. Part of privacy and security involves compartmentalization, by doing EVERYTHING on a single device, you're creating alot of digital exhaust originating back to one device. Might be better ways to do things. Also, the more "not phone stuff" (social media, this app, that app, so on and so fourth) you add to your phone, the more data is being collected about a device that you carry with you everywhere, everyday. Food for thought.
[deleted] I prefer Ubuntu or Linux Mint over Pop (https://ubuntu.com/ https://linuxmint.com/), but all are good choices. All of them are Linux at the end of the day.
I agree however, keeping a laptop has its percs. Unless OP is trying to go super minimal I would keep it.
Smartphones nowadays are powerful. The only problem is if you need applications that are only available on a desktop operating system like Adobe applications.
Otherwise you can store for example your data on the cloud and your login credentials on your brain or a piece of paper. If your phone is broken you just need to buy a new one and connect again to the cloud.
If you need a bigger screen, a keyboard, a mouse, etc., solutions are available.
raccoondad linux mint is very outdated in many ways. Highly recommend against it.
It is so behind on many things (e.g. Wayland support) it is crazy how so many people use it.
I recommend Fedora from ublue.it. its a better way to ship a Linux Distro, more like Android but not as limited.
I would recommend Secureblue, but the Dev simply rejects anything usability-related, so out of the box the experience will be biased, restricted and not optimized. It is a very important project though, and I will make a repo for modifications and additions to make it actually a good Experience.
missing-root Fedora is pretty good (I never really used it, but was happy with what I saw when I have used it) but why ublue? Is it because of Redhat?
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Pop seems to be pretty well rounded. Theres no telemetry, it ships with full disk encryption option during install, it has a full GUI, it has its own repos (plus ubuntu repo mirror) + application store, you know it's going to be supported well as system76 makes hardware, etc.
raccoondad ublue "consumes" the immutable Versions of Fedora and makes them better.
They add codecs, and they have many images with custom kernels and mainly the proprietary NVIDIA modules. Those are not possible to ship by Fedora and 3rd party installation is not possible on immutable, so they prepackage these.
Also they remove some annoying preferences by fedora
- no automatic updates (ublue has fully automatic updates)
- flathub instead of fedora flatpaks
- distrobox instead of just toolbox
They stay close to upstream, but use OCI containers (like Docker) which can be built anywhere, instead of ostree remotes.
Nothing to do with Redhat.
[deleted] i love their work on the full Rust GUI and RedoxOS.
GNOME and KDE are otherwise the only options. KDE is completely and forever memory unsafe (asked the Devs, never leaving Qt or even allowing Slint into core KDE apps), and GNOME is simply far behind.
Cosmic is fresh, all the ideas already tested, no old junk, everything how people like it. Extremely fast, modern and Wayland only.
RedoxOS on the other hand tries to be the better Linux. Once Cosmic is in a pretty finished state, it can be ported to RedoxOS which will then look amazing.
Poorly it seems many coreutil rewrite projects are on ice. If the main devs dont decide to rewrite the GNU stuff, it may be problematic.
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A little reminder, look at the title of the post before you get too carried away