Matt

While I’ve only dealt with Discover support for a couple of minor issues, it definitely left a positive impression. There was no automated system I had to fight against and a native English speaker answered right away. They were also knowledgeable and not just reading from a script. Definitely among the better customer service experiences I have had.

Brave is great for less techy people because it's defaults are good enough. It's not necessary to tweak settings and install add-ons to get basic privacy. I definitely prefer Firefox, but it takes some knowledge to get it to surpass Brave's defaults.

Liftoff for now. It's the least buggy Android client I have come across. I definitely prefer Memmy on iOS though.

They are not ready for regular use yet. Performance is poor and battery life is bad. It's fun to play with my Pinephone and watch the software slowly improve, but there is no way I could use it as my primary phone.

Apple Music because it doesn’t shove podcasts down my throat. I also prefer the algorithm on Apple Music over Spotify. Spotify is too safe by only recommending music that I already like, while I have discovered new genres that I now love from using Apple Music. Spotify is just too repetitive in my experience. I do miss the Discover Weekly playlist though. That was the one thing that helped me discover new music on Spotify.

I hope they bring the Fairphone 5 to the US in a reasonable amount of time, because the 4 is just too old for the price being charged.

Kind of. There is the PinePhone and Librem 5 that both run full Linux. I have a Pinephone. Unfortunately, the hardware is underpowered and the software is not ready to replace iOS or Android. The battery is also not good. The standby has improved a lot, so it can last a day of limited use, but the battery drains very quickly when the device is actively being used. It's definitely fun to play around with, and it even has the convergence feature Microsoft tried to do with Windows Phone. The UI changes to regular desktop Linux when plugging the phone into a monitor and connecting a keyboard and mouse. But again, the hardware really limits what can be done.

In short, Linux phones are a thing, but not reliable enough to be the only phone a person has.

Slide is open source.

Good old reliable RSS. You get exactly the sources you want and without an algorithm trying to influence what you see.

Verizon caught on and closed that loophole, so we will have to see whether T-Mobile does as well.

Audiobookshelf works great and is very easy to setup using Docker. I get most of my audiobooks through Downpour. They have a subscription that gives credits to redeem for audiobooks similar to Audible, but they are drm-free. I download the audiobooks and move them to my NAS that has Audiobookshelf running on it. Audiobookshelf has a web client and apps for Android and iOS (TestFlight beta).

• AntennaPod
• Bitwarden
• Firefox