Swap out Brave for Fennec (Firefox fork) to stay away from Chromium perhaps?

Begun, the clone war has...

My daily driver is a 2014 i5 machine with 4GB RAM, running Fedora 43 Sway (riced but no animations).

It can simultaneously run Emacs, Librewolf 6-8 tabs (research), Helium 2-3 tabs (for email, calendar & cloud drive) and 1-2 desktop chat apps. If I flick on Freetube at this point, it'll freeze up.

I've got a pretty minimalist approach to work so I don't have too many things running most of the time. I use mostly system packages and Flatpaks sparingly. I can keep running this thing as my daily driver for a few more years.

Also stick a 27" display and a pair of 5" powered studio speakers into it in the evenings to enjoy some movie streaming.

ps: I've recently configured another 12GB of virtual memory (?) on the SSD to support the 4GB RAM on the machine and that has significantly helped with multitasking.

ps2: Sharing the above to encourage to try Linux out. I came to this with zero knowledge amd experience. Really amazing what's possible.

ps3: May be also good to mention that if first ran Linux Mint (with no optimisations or modifications) on this machine and only moved to Fedora a year later. Both distros worked flawlessly. If anybody is keen to know why I moved from Linux Mint to Fedora, please ask and I will share my experience.

I jumped through hoops with the Samsung. ADB-ed the hexk out of it and broke functionality in so many ways.

If I can save you the effort - DON'T even bother trying. There is just too much interconnectedness to undo without breakage.

I moved to a hunch of Pixels running Graphene and have lived happily ever after.

With the added Israeli spyware coming to Samsung, I cannot think of any reason to put any effort into it.

Additional info: Skip the Pixel 6 and 7. Its better to spend a little more in the Pixel 8. I got mine used and its brilliant. I also liked how the Pixels 4 and 5 were as well. Very good devices.

Get your Pixel secondhand. That way you are not contributing to their profit margins and have more flexibility on the Pixel version you want without having to break the bank.

And I also agree with the comment that Pixels are not the most robust phones. They are good, but not the most robust thing you could own. Power but to issue across Pixel devices is a real thing. I had two of the power buttons on separate phones fall out. Good thing is that you can get them online cheaply and manually replace them yourself.

BUT Pixels are gorgeous phones and a real delight to use as well. Lovely screens, decent battery, good camera and is buttery smooth with Graphene.

I am on these Pixels because if Graphene.

The hardware shortcomings I can live with and work around. I mostly have great experiences with Pixels with the occasional hardware issue to slove.

I use the on-screen Accessibility Menu shortcut to adjust audio volume, screen brightness and un/locking the phone.

This is old news, from 2022!!

They are the caricature of organised religions.

Agreed. We dont hear enough for the US to confess to its war crimes, many of which are still going on today.

Signal desktop is designed to be a stand alone app that uses the phone phone to first verify the connection via QR but after that relays messages, calls, erc direct from and to the server, inrependently of the phone app.

Opening para from a NYT article on the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley:

"The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home."

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

Telegram is neither private nor secure. Its not encrypted bu default. Normal texts as well as group chat is stored unencrypted on its servers.

For everyday use with friends, family and work (assuming these folks already have your number), Signal may be the best thing out there as its open source both on server and app levels. Signal is also end to end encrypted (E2EE) with decryption keys stored on device.

For anonymous communications Session and SimpleX may be better as they are both E2EE and doesnt requie a phone number as an identifier.

Just chuck out Whatsapp, Telegram and all the other closed sourced garbage apps.

Out of curiosity, why Matrix and not these other options:

• Jabber/XMPP - has a creat client called Conversations (decentralised)
• SimpleX - by far the most anonymous and potentially decent privacy (centralised server)
• Session - a Signal fork without requiring phone number

• all of the above are listed on F-Droid