I think Breeze already includes folder icons of all colours, you just have to find them with that icon picker.

They can read them, obviously, but this way they are stored in an encrypted format in case of breaches or warrants.

But why would you need to delete your account? Just stop giving then any more money. Don’t renew your subscription, and watch the movies when you like.

Or, you know… 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

As an empiricist I cringe at any statement given with 100% certainty.

You sound like someone who’s never used a HRM before. Chest straps are simply the HRM design that’s been around the longest, and is the most accurate and responsive.

All chest straps have exactly the same limitations if they don’t work for you or your use case I’m sorry to hear that. You bought the wrong product, and a different vendor would have made no difference at all.

Just wash it well and resell it on eBay, I’m sure you can recoup a good fraction of your loss.

By now also the LED based readings, which you get from either a wristwatch or an armband seem to have reached a decent level of performance, so that may serve you better.

I don’t expose either to the internet. I either vpn to the router, or (for movies and music) do most of the syncing when I’m at home.

Oh, I was able to fill 128GB, but with 256GB I still have not managed. I was not even close after ~2 years, and then I had to erase everything when I installed /e/OS.

I do take photos and (rarely) videos, I just don’t keep it all on my phone all the time, I regularly offload them to the home server (Immich).

Same with Series and Music. That stuff lives on the home server (Jellyfin) and can be downloaded to my phone as needed, with transcoding on the fly to a lower quality that’s reasonable on the phone screen (for video) or simply to Opus (for music) to save space. My earbuds are decent but I can’t tell the difference, so that’s good.

Are you me 8 months ago? I was using Mi Band 8 while looking at maybe eventually buying a Garmin Instinct type watch. Then the Xiaomi died during a quick swim in the sea in early october and I pulled the trigger on the Instinct 2S solar.

The Garmin is great, it’s so superior to the Xiaomi in literally everything that it’s not even funny.

So you have a difficult choice, between European (Polar) at the cost of having to use their App, or Gadgetbridge, and then Garmin is really the best choice by far from almost any angle.

Oh man, do you have a minute to talk about our Lord and saviour Gadgetbridge?

It’s an open source, 100% local Android app that can be used to replace vendor app for certain wearables. And it works really well with my Garmin Instinct 2s.

https://gadgetbridge.org/

You can keep your Fenix going, and cut out the American server.

At some point we should have a serious discussion about what does it even mean to be a European company, to put in focus a common idea, even if it has blurry edges and if it doesn’t translate neatly in all situations.

We’re discussing smartwatches, and Suunto gets shut down for being headquartered and operated from Finland BUT owned by a Chinese holding.

At the same time Garmin is a Swiss corporation, but run from Kansas, so that’s not European.

And all all all smartwatches are made in China anyway. Maybe I should make a post.

For what it’s worth, I absolutely LOVE my Garmin Instinct 2s, whether it’s yank tech or not.

The user experience manages to be really good even without a touch screen, the tracking is very very good, and it works extremely well with Gadgetbridge.

I have used many such chest straps, and that applies to all of them.

And I’m sorry it doesn’t work for you, but my Polar H10 works. Which is now a decade old because I can replace the battery, instead of having a built in rechargeable battery that makes the whole thing disposable…

Depending on budget and preferences.

The closest to your Fossil is probably Withings (French)

The two most serious brands for sport watches Polar and Suunto (both Finnish)

Of you want something more affordable that looks reasonable, you can look at Nothing/CMF.

At least some of the Withings and Nothing CMF are compatible with Gadgebridge, an open source alternative to the manufacturer’s apps.

tl;dr it works really great for me, but there is no complete guarantee for the future, if that’s not acceptable stay away.

So far, yes, at least for me. Telegram, WhatsApp, Netflix, banking, you name it. I have apps from three different banks, and they are perfect. Even the itsme app of the belgian government works a-ok. But there is no guarantee that this will always be the case.

Notably Revolut has embraced enthusiastically the new Play Integrity system, and does not work at all on any third party ROM since late autumn. I was not a customer, but it has pissed many people off.

It is not impossible that this might happen with more banks in the future.

The App of my German mutuality didn’t work at the beginning (refused to log me in due to “issues with my device”) but after a later update now works fine. Who know how long that will be.

Some Google things you simply loose, such as Google Pay, I also have had very mixed success with Chromecast.

Android Auto works, but refuses to use any other navigation app than GMaps and Waze. I tried installing Mapy, HereWeGo, Organic, Magic Earth… But it doesn’t work. I half understand the reason, but I haven’t figured out a solution yet.

I also couldn’t get Slay the Spire to work, I guess it depends on some Google Play Games feature. That’s probably for the better, I already spend too much time playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which is an open source roguelike available on F-Droid. Highly recommend.

I use Arch and am fairly familiar with a terminal.

Avoid their Easy Installer, it just doesn’t work. And pay a lot of attention to the anti downgrade feature of the Bootloader. It’s described in their guide for the FP4.

Outside of that, just follow the guide, it was pretty straightforward.

It was honestly way more work to backup everything I had on the phone…

None of those is nowhere near parity with the big tech alternative.

I actually use mailbox.org, I pay for it, and I really like it. But try to convince most people to pay for that over a free Outlook.con account and they’ll ask you for their money back.

It’s not enough to say “just switch, what’s the problem”.

All those options are more than fine for me and you, and they’re excellent starting points that could become great with the right push.

And you could have pretended to read the link, it’s actually interesting, by someone who spent a little more time working with and thinking about these things than either me and you.

GOS’s security is very cool, but my threat model does not justify buying more disposable tech just for that.

It’s a useful comparison, but biased. The fact that it gives “all green” to the GrapheneOS choice of using actual Google Play though sandboxed, while MicroG is all red… Is hard to defend. So you have to actually read the whole thing instead of just looking at the colors.

Also, it’s somewhat outdated.

The /e/OS I’m writing from now has an alternarive network location provider, built in UnifiedPush support, and it passes Basic Integrity, at least since December last year.

Reposting what I said below:

They’re OK. They used to suck ass on a cosmic level, until a firmware update made it actually just fine.

Noone is going to be amazed, but they’re fine.

My wife has a Pixel 8 with stock firmware which is supposed to be oh-so-great as a camera…

But the whatever built in AI Google put in that thing keeps messing with the colours worse than a Netflix show. So half the times I end up prefering the pictures I take.

According to Fairphone the cameras in the FP5 are actually much better, but I have yet to see an FP5 in the wild so…

Except they’re Dutch so they’re all drinking Heineken.

(Dutch craft beer is really great, the big names like Amstel and Heineken are piss)