As in ready to go phones? Not really no. There are Linux phones like the pine phone, but they are not really ready for prime time in any way.

sailfish os says its Linux based and supports android abi 33, but they’re Europe only. I’ve not heard much about them other than they support old Sony Xperia phones so can’t really comment if they’re more usable than the pinephone.

It would be worth a try since this seems to be mostly performance related glitches

Offhand anecdotes here as I only have Ubuntu on a 2012 MacBook.

That said the error post update is likely just a service that didn’t restart properly. Many of these are not necessarily critical, does it say what program crashed? A reboot would guarantee a fix here.

Unfortunately the issues with apps might be the snap packaging, this does slow apps down a bit which could cause pretty much all the remaining issues. I haven’t personally used it but might look up flatpak as a replacement and see if that helps. If others don’t explain how to do this I will try to come edit this later with an explainer or link or something to help.

For as much hate as it gets Ubuntu (or kubuntu for the kde version) will feel very familiar in usage and will have a newer kernel. It’s my default it just needs to work distro if regular Debian isn’t an issue due to drivers or something similar.

Thanks for the heads up!

Assuming the drive writes normally a simple command like

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX

Where sdX is the location of the drive should do the trick. Depending on drive time this may take a bit.

This was a few drives ago but there was a point in time when most places were giving me digital copies of tax documents which I could upload to tax prep software but things like TurboTax didn’t have an auto import. So you’d need to download them then re-upload them to the correct service. Now they do it automatically so the only thing that would match that now now is receipts for expenses/donations and what not that I need to keep track of for manual entry.

I started encrypting once I moved to having a decent number of solid state drives as the tech can theoretically leave blocks unerased once they go bad. Before that my primary risk factor was at end of life recycling which I usually did early so I wasn’t overly concerned about tax documents/passwords etc being left as I’d use dd to write over the platters prior to recycling.

I really miss Ubuntu from around that era, was by far the easiest thing to get up and running!

Vista was what pushed me to Linux originally, and I still haven’t gone back!

I don’t use lutris, but you could add lutris as a non-steam game in desktop mode so it pops up in gaming mode. I do that with Firefox so I can use the web without having to jump back and forth.

While you’re not wrong there are still FreeBSD pain points particularly around wifi that remind me of 2007 when I first moved to Linux (and then FreeBSD). They’re working on it and have some funding put aside to pay developers to help remedy this. Laptops also are very likely to have odd and end edge cases, for instance my chromebook needs to pass audio over i2c which FreeBSD doesn’t support and even linux needs some hacky scripts to run through the commands to enable this (and the script needed an update because THIS particular model was slightly different from others by the same brand…). Linux in this regard moves much faster in getting support going and requires little to no pain especially in comparison. I love FreeBSD and use it everywhere I possilby can but there’s certainly things it’s just not easy/practical to use it for right now.

I use FreeBSD on a desktop as a server and for desktop usage with a touchscreen to run a virtual pipe organ that needs an obscene amount of resources to run. There’s a few things that I see as pros:

1. Zfs on root/by default. Absolutely love zfs and not having to screw around with dkms/kernel issues etc to get it running is a huge plus imo

2. Jails - I cannot stand docker. It’s opaque and I’m stuck trusting that whatever image I’m downloading is updated/secured and or running multiple extra containers to stack together. With jails I spent my time setting up the jail once (installing services etc), and using a jail manager (bastille) I can maintain what I think is better control of the internals and updates etc. the commands mirror the os as well which is nice

3. Integrated world - the way bsd integrates the core system and separates out the packages means most security updates just need a service restart not a full reboot so uptime between OS patches can be months at a time. They’re also very conservative about changing how the core system functions so how I install/set up/maintain the system in 2007 is the same as today.

4. The manual. Anything I need to know when adding services including edge use cases is in the manual on their website. Much cleaner written than the arch manual, and has a pdf download available if you aren’t going to always have the internet (and a terminal interfaced manual option to download).

For my usage there’s not much I can think of for cons, but I will say laptops and particularly WiFi suffer currently. There’s funding and works in progress to fix this but still idk I’d use it on a laptop today without carefully checking support for the hardware like I would’ve with old school Linux. They’ve come a long way recently with edge cases for instance I’m currently running a windows vm with gpu pass thru using their bhyve vm manager, something that wasn’t supported a year ago, so I am optimistic the funding will help in the next few years on some of the laptop issues.

This happened to me by even though I had never hard configured anything… had to go to the config folder and find the offending definition and delete it

Almost certainly, and get security updates something I’d very much want if I let the tablet off the local network. I would love to see this thing get to that point to ditch android entirely.

If your kids software is available in Ubuntu maybe? At a glance I’d wonder how power efficient it would be (my $100 Walmart tablet lasts all week with light usage, I doubt this could compare), and would have to wonder as well on gpu performance. It’s likely not optimized yet so idk I’d trust 800 mhz as enough.

I think the article sums it up best:

RISC-V computing is a promising field but best ploughed by developers, early adopters, and tech enthusiasts at present. RISC-V chip performance is improving, but it’s not “there” for mainstream adoption — yet.

It’d be a ton of fun to tinker with and if you have the money to risk I’d say go for it! But I wouldn’t buy this for a kid unless I had the extra $150 to potentially get them a normal android tablet if this didn’t work as well as hoped.

This is what I do, I can confirm it works

Because every time I’m reminded the underlying OS exists it’s always something negative.

On windows: Forced restarts and updates that take over 5x as long as my Linux (or FreeBSD build), ui that constantly undoes what I customized, ads and preinstalled malware essentially like candy crush even on builds from Microsoft directly, worse performance with a much higher number of crashes under load on my current box, and no auto login/name any simple customization without screwing around with registry editor to name just the simple things. More advanced problems include no hypervisor built in to the home version, everything is pay to unlock features my Linux install does for free, no zfs software raid for storage safekeeping, most fixes when I do have errors involve googleing cryptic hex codes and being told to run fsck/chdsk as the only solution for often times hours of searching before finally finding the actual answer - not to mention most other fixes being to download a library/binary of the sketchiest sounding website ever that i can’t verify isn’t a virus.

On linux or even FreeBSD which took a bit to get installed to my liking i may have put work in up front but its like 3 hours at most of my time for 6+ years of stability and proper functioning to avoid all of the above plus no microsoft telemetry etc. I switched when i first tried Vista and even today every time i have to use Microsoft’s horrific excuse for an OS it is heartburn inducing.

I’d agree, that’s fantastic to hear!

Do they have a price announced yet? I love the idea, just unsure how well they can compete with others on price