Real question: Is it not possible to install KDE, even though they do not provide an ISO with it?

I've mostly been very satisfied with my InfinityBook 14 Gen7 that I got about 1.5 years ago. There have been some hardware issues (something wrong with the audio subboard that causes the sound from the speakers to go out once in a while, but they sent a new one that I haven't installed yet...). The mic is also not very good (some background noise), and the speakers when they work (which is most of the time) are also quite weak. I decided to spec it out as much as possible, and it does get hot under high loads, like gaming. The case is sleek, but perhaps a little flimsy?

But mostly it works perfectly fine, and it is such a great upgrade over my old MacBook that I finally get to do stuff on my computer now, and run into very few limitations (running newer games and other GPU-intensive tasks requiring more than 4 GB VRAM are the only things). Not to mention that I've had very good experience with their customer service when I n00b out and can't troubleshoot my way back.

• I'm using FitoTrack to keep track of running, biking, hiking and walking with GPS-data.
• I have a Xiaomi Mi Band 7 that's set up with Gadgetbridge to keep track of especially heart rate and roughly sleep habits (though not very accurate).
• I use Loop Habit Tracker for various habits I want to keep, not only related to health.
• openScale to keep track of weight data with my Xiaomi Mi Body Composition Scale 2. I think this can use GadgetBridge as well, but openScale works like I want, so I have not bothered trying it out.

For the most part, I try to set up automatic data exports from these apps that is synced with my Nextcloud server, and my plan is to eventually develop something of a dashboard that allows me to easily view historical data from all these sources, but as of now it more a backup solution.

Cheers, that's pretty cool! I've looked into scrcpy before, but never got around to testing it. The way you present it is super easy, so I will definitely give this a shot!

Regarding my problem, it seems it wasn't as fixed as I thought :p The connection issue described in the original post still comes once in a while, not sure what triggers it, but it usually resolves if I ping the device and run iptraf to monitor the traffic. Probably superstitious, seems weird to me that it should fix it. It also happened once between my laptop and my new machine, so it was not isolated to the phone after all.

Hehe yeah, this persisted over several days and through several reboots and on two different phones. No clue what changed as I understood iptraf to simply help me diagnose. But a run directly before and after running iptraf for the first time had different results, and now I am reproducing it every time.

Very strange - I just installed it, and as soon as I ran it, the output in Termux went from "Destionation Host Unreachable" to responses from my machine. Outbound pings from my machine also now get a response. I assume this was only supposed to help diagnose and not fix the issue? :p

KDE Connect is still acting up though, but at least they can talk to each other now! Thanks :)

ufw is disabled, so it shouldn't matter if it is set up or not, right? As far as I can tell I don't have any other firewall software running - I've not installed anything, so it would be the default Linux Mint-stuff that I would have installed and enabled in that case.

I am very happy using FreeTube as an alternative frontend. No ads, all my subscriptions and watch history are local.

I am on an FP4 and there is nothing sluggish about it.

Out of genuine curiosity from someone who has never used it, what are the features of Android Auto that are so good/useful that it alone would determine whether to use a custom ROM or not?

Agreed. I made the switch after Mendeley pushed their online manager with only a new limited desktop client, which was awful. Couldn't believe I hadn't gone with Zotero in the first place. Originally only used for my thesis, now I use for work and personal interests as well.

Over the course of 14 years, I had five different iPhones: 3GS in 2009, iPhone 4S in 2011, iPhone 6 in 2014, an iPhone XS in 2018 and now a work-only phone owned by my company which I don't know the model of - I barely use it. I also had a brief Android-spell from mid-2010 until the release of the 4S with an HTC Legend which was a truly awful experience, and turned me off from Android for a long time until I bought a Fairphone 4 for personal use end of last year and installed CalyxOS on it. No regrets making the switch.

But yeah, I liked iPhones for a while. My prejudice against Android was unfortunate, but HTC Legend was a truly awful phone that lost support for updates quickly after I got it, and was also not prioritized by the modding community. I was going to get an HTC Desire, but they were sold out at the time, and I was about to go into the military, so waiting was not an option. If I got the Desire, I think the experience would've been better, but instead I sat with the impression that you could not count on long-term support for Android-devices, and that the hardware was rubbish.

I adopted iPhones at the same time as I departed from my teenage more tech-oriented years in favor of more social stuff at high school and university, so avoiding spending time on customization through the whole "you get what exactly we want you to get"-vibe of Apple worked fine for me then. It is the same shit that eventually drove me mad and made me ditch both iOS and macOS last year in favor of Android and Linux.

The hardware itself is quite good. They lasted increasingly longer for my use, but battery performance was shit towards the end and I was not going to spend a fortune changing the battery. My new phone has an easily changeable battery. Other than repairability, new features of smartphones have not excited me for many years.

The Apple ecosystem never really worked for me. I had iCloud only because the price point was much better than Dropbox for my use when I made the change. Other than that I really didn't use much of their stuff, which made the transition a lot easier than it could've been. Exporting iCloud-stuff from a non-Apple device was a chore though... But since I also did not use much of the ecosystem, that was also a big "why bother"-point. But my main grievance is the lack of openness and control over your own device. I also have an old iPad now that sits with no use cases, because I can't get a recent enough iOS-version installed, and I can't install another operating system as far as I know. It's so wasteful.