I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone’s release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.
Considering that many of these “surveys” report statistics per model or even make, and some companies and models stretch years, if not decades (Corolla, Civic, F-150, etc.), and others are around for only a few years (Volt, Clarity, Ioniq), the results are almost always going to be out of whack.
Also, they probably don’t consider: which country/state the vehicle is available in (can’t buy Prius Prime and some EVs in the US midwest), the average accident rate for that country/state, demographics, place of use (city/country) etc.
A while ago, I saw that Chevy Volt was one of the most accident-prone cars or something like that. It has been out of production for a few years, and oldest cars were 10+ years old. Probably many resales, hand-me-downs, etc, all resulting in an emergent property of higher accident rate.
I don’t watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.
Other than with language models, this has already happened: Take a look at apps such as Merlin Bird ID (identifies birds fairly well by sound and somewhat okay visually), WhoBird (identifies birds by sound, ) Seek (visually identifies plants, fungi, insects, and animals). All of them work offline. IMO these are much better uses of ML than spammer-friendly text generation.
Series plug-in hybrids that can run on battery (Chevy Volt, Honda Clarity, Prius 2024) are IMO better than both. They effectively operate like electric vehicles (regenerative braking and all), and one can drive them for months without burning gas. Their batteries are about five times smaller (~30-50mi range vs full EV’s ~250mi range), and thus lighter, and the gasoline engine is usually a small, efficient one (~40ish mpg on gas)
Ironically, Toyota already had some sketchy anti-EV reputation:
Toyota was famously one of the few automakers who sided with the Trump Administration in their legal fight against California trying to impose their own stricter emission regulations.
The Japanese didn’t stop there, and more recently, it warned the new US federal government against promoting all-electric vehicles.
From Electrek
Also, IIRC, it was Toyota and Honda that actively lobbied against CARB limits and indirectly led to EV1’s demise. (Can’t find the sources ATM)
Biktor and Lynxis will be working on OpenIMSd, which aims to bring VoLTE (4G voice calls) to Qualcomm based phones (like the PinePhone)
This is fantastic news, and I wish them all the best. Reliable VoLTE/WoWiFi calls was my main (but obviously major) issue with the PinePhone.
Another FYI: Ubuntu Touch does not support VoLTE at all, thus it might be more difficult to use it in some networks and countries (for example, USA shut down 3G some years ago)
However, I was pleasantly surprised by the responsive UI, the browser, and Cinny (the Matrix Client)
Fossify Messages and QKSMS/QUIK (unmaintained but has worked well for years)
You might enjoy N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. The setting at first appears as fantasy, but there is a sci-fi-like depth to everything. The climate and periodic catastrophic Seasons, the tectonics, orogeny (humans’ magic-like abilities to manipulate heat and tectonics), and “high-tech” of the world’s past history.
I was interested in these “light” phones for a bit, but they seem a bit gimmicky and expensive. I understand not having a browser on purpose, but for communication, none of them (AFAIK) support Matrix or even XMPP (even some old feature phones had a Java Jabber client). Punkt MP02 supports Signal though.
Android phone with custom ROM (Lineage, /e/, Graphene, DivestOS…) is a possibility, and would be usable until hardware is incompatible with the phone/wifi networks.
If you have a patience of a saint, PinePhone and Librem5 are Linux phones, both in fairly early stages.
Hype still sells and we still idolize people though. Businessmen such as Steve Jobs or (early) Elon Musk curate an image of themselves as a “genius”, which leads to popularity of their products and influences trends and opinions in specific fields.
Really though, no single person did or invented anything alone. Every well-known and highly regarded scientist, inventor, or businessman built their work as a small increment on top of hundreds of predecessors. The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow is a good pop-sci book that carries that point throughout.
Here are a few other interesting green automotive startups that didn’t make it:
From Wikipedia