April 17 updates

Both Android and Ubuntu received official updates today 🙂

Made a clean install of Ubuntu 17.04, everything works well out of the box.
Then there’s the compulsory: 17 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 17.04

Was surprised at the size of the Android security patch at over 300 MB to version 7.1.2!
All was well until a week later my phone bricked; I pulled it out of my pocket and it wouldn’t respond to my thumb print.

Thought nothing more of it, charged it overnight thinking the battery was drained, but it wouldn’t start the morning after 🙁

Tried booting into bootloader with zero success. So returned it to the store I picked it up from, stoked there’s a 2 year warranty… hope to get it back in the next few days.

In the mean time I’ve been using a fresh unboxed iPhone 6 we had sat around the house (don’t ask) and I’m shocled to say that I’m warming to it… or not as opposed as I thought I would be.

pros

• all the google apps I use are installed; mainly Gmail, Google Drive & Play Music
• podcasts easy to subscibe, although the default player isn’t as intuitive as I’d like
• think the sound and quality is better from Play Music
• quicker to take photos, great quality… although not sure how the quality compares to Nexus 5x
• photos upload to Google Drive
• battery lasts longer than 5X, charges fast, but not close to the speed of USB-C

cons

• no NFC – can’t use Yubi Key
• can’t set Firefox as default browser, but do get Firefox Focus

My biggest gripe though is the fingerprint unlock button.
I’m used to the 5X opening first time, with fingers and thumbs able to open up the screen.

The iPhone unlock seemed to work first time for the first week but now only works periodically, frustrating.

Also been playing with OpenSUSE in VirtualBox.

It does everything I need and looks great.
I miss apt-get, but maybe not enough to be a barrier to try it as my main distro for a while… then again I have my graphics card working perfectly in Ubuntu so not keen on rocking the boat.