Oof. I'm tolerant of a lot of "broken stuff" in software (I've run ARM SBCs as desktops for quite a few years, though I'm off that because QubesOS doesn't work

Oof. I'm tolerant of a lot of "broken stuff" in software (I've run ARM SBCs as desktops for quite a few years, though I'm off that because QubesOS doesn't work on ARM yet), but that's an impressive pile of "almost, but not quite, sort of barely working." Unfortunately, stuff like this is a dealbreaker for me: > The bad news is that currently the Pinephone Pro picks up your audio as if you're talking underwater (that's what I'm told I sound like) and the receiving end gets an echo on their own voice. It works, but it's quite the bad quality. I've set personal limits on my "phone experimentation" that I can't irritate other people too terribly badly. For me, this means "Voice calls have to work and be understandable," and "I have to be able to interact with MMS based group text chats" - and I've briefly used some devices that I stopped using because it wasn't able to meet these requirements. I can work around just about everything else, be less contactable, etc, but if I'm going to have a phone number, raw basic "voice, SMS, and MMS" have to be working. > But apart from that, it performs excellent as a smart device. There is a host of awesome apps that provide the usual smartphone services, like train and plane tickets and travel routes, calender functions, weather, podcasts, etc. You shouldn't need a smart device for any of that stuff, though. I've mostly "gone back to paper" - I don't carry a smartphone anymore (even though I was very into them for quite a few years), and I'm able to be a bit pointed when places don't consider the possibility that someone doesn't have a smartphone *. I don't want to live in a world in which "everyone must have a smartphone or they can't participate in modern life," and I see fighting against that best accomplished by "not having a smartphone" - as opposed to trying to find a somewhat less-evil device that can do most of what you want a smartphone to do. Been there, tried that, realized I was spending most of my CPU cycles building kernels and software so I could try to debug yet another weird issue... Besides, I get about two weeks of battery life on my flip phone. ;) EDIT: *: To expand a bit, "have a smartphone and be willing to install whatever apps they ask you to." In terms of practical technical outcome, "I have a device that can install apps and refuse to do so" is the same as "I don't have a device that can do this." But from a human interaction perspective, the first is often enough perceived as just being a jerk, whereas the second typically gets a bit more of a baffled response - I think there are quite a few people who genuinely don't realize that there are non-smart-phones still in use, because their entire social circle has them. The second opens up a more productive conversation in my experience.