Okey, it’s like this: You and youtube both generate two keys, public and private. Public keys are public, anyone can see them. Doesn’t matter. When you send a message to youtube, you encrypt it with their public key. Now, the trick is, the encryption is asymmetric, which means that the message can only be decoded if you also know the private key, which you never send anyone but keep hidden. Right? This way, as long as your private key is secure, you can not realistically decode the encryption from outside just knowing the public key. Thus setting up a secure connection is just an exchange of public keys.
The first time I installed Debian on my desktop I didn’t do my homework properly. This was a long time ago. It didn’t take long for me to realize just how out of date many packages were and that was a deal breaker. I have since used Debian successfully in different contexts, because I knew what to expect. I still wouldn’t install Debian stable on my desktop because I prefer to have a more up to date environment. Might try Debian sid one of these days though. But yeah, Debian, great distro, but you need to know what you’re getting in to.
I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but…
There is no “supposed to” when it comes to distro preferences. Use whatever you like, other people’s opinions do not dictate your behavior. If Ubuntu works for you, use that. If anything, that’s the freedom of FOSS. You can take other people’s views in to account when choosing a distro, but in the end it is your decision. I dislike Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I don’t get to dictate to anyone else what they use and why.
If you like rolling release, you could try Debian sid/unstable. I hear it’s quite stable and reliable and, of course, isn’t Ubuntu.
I have a Mobian community edition PinePhone with postmarketOS and it is my daily driver. It suits my humble needs, but these few years have been a mixed bag. Especially with Mobian I’ve had periods of it working great, punctuated by periods with annoying issues. I stopped using the phone for a while when it suddenly stopped taking calls but I didn’t notice since there was no indication of trouble. My family reported me missing when they couldn’t reach me after a few days. Luckily that was then sorted out, but it wasn’t great. This hasn’t happened since.
postmarketOS has been pretty solid and seems to perform better than Mobian.
After a few years I’m starting to think I need a new battery, but the official store has been out of stock for a while. I’m not sure if they will ever get more parts. Communication from Pine64 has also slowed down to a crawl, which is not great. At least their official monthly blog was last updated in august. At the moment I’m somewhat skeptical of their future. We’ll see.
Be warned though: the PinePhone can browse the web and banking probably works, but watching, say, youtube is not going to be a great experience. You’re probably better off using alternative solutions like Pipeline. The PinePhone is not a powerful machine and you will have tinker every now and then.
Having said all that, if you set your expectations correctly you can probably get along with a PinePhone as your daily driver. I’m not sure if I can recommend it because there are many caveats, but in the end you know your needs and what you’re comfortable with better than I do. I like my PinePhone and I surely wish more people get Linux phones and that the ecosystem evolves.
Well, I moved away from Fedora with the licensing change and telemetry proposal. It’s a great distro and it’s pretty much the most cohesive experience I’ve had with linux, but those issues have made me wary. We’ll see where they go from here, but for now I’m looking elsewhere.