I am quite comfortable finding my way around ArchLinux, and recently decided to give Gentoo a try. I didn’t expect it to be that much harder but all the cflags, emerge, conflicts and updates feels like black magic. I guess that if you know your way around Gentoo, reverse-engineering a deb file is not a real challenge. However I’m assuming that most Linux users would hope for a less involved solution.
Arch User Repository. If you’re using Arch, you get the basic stuff from the official repositories. But for most programs there’s the AUR. They’re often less polished, some of it may be proprietary. There are package managers dedicated for it, that also know to handle the official repositories.
Requiring a headphone jack in 2023 rules out most “flagship” phones. If you’re looking for a mid-range then your odds are better. But if you want a phone with better camera array, then you’re leaving mid-range territory and chances are that you’d have to compromise on either the headphone jack or your camera quality. That’s about what I meant by “compromise” - the requirement for a headphone jack significantly limits your choices.
Well, you can have a DIY version that feels like the real thing, but with more features. All you need is a fairly modern phone of your choice, a strong glue and a brick. You may want to paint it in beige just for the heck of it afterwards.
They did decide for me by the point that a once obvious feature to include in a phone is discarded in all but a very slight number of niche phones where I’d have to compromise on a bunch of other features in return for something that used to be almost mandatory feature at once point.
While I do care about the headphone jack, I am mostly bitter about the manufacturers deciding for me that I don’t need it. I’d heavily trade off 10% reduction in thickness for a user-replaceable battery and a headphone jack, but it was decided for me that a thinner phone is a big improvement.
No. It should be minimalistic by default. If you want to add a tail just grab one from the AUR.