Auster

Any with good hardware as long as you can switch to stable and community-made ROMs.

If you like reading books, comics, etc, maybe Librera Reader?

Dunno how it is on Google Play, but it’s available FOSS and DRM free outside of it:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/

On the plus side, this gives people plenty of time to tackle their ever increasing backlogs, and also to give companies more reasons to put out a functional product in order to compete with all the kilometric backlogs people already have.

Same as the past 10 or so years, from what I can tell.

You also need to find instructions specific to your device on how to unlock the bootloader, and a TWRP specific to your device. From there, you do a clean flash through TWRP (erasing certain partitions and then installing the new ROM), and then, you should be good to go.

First, I’d suggest flashing a community system ROM. OEM systems are both very bloated, and stop being supported much earlier than community ones, so they’re not ideal unless you need to use it with some banking app or the sort. And if you don’t need Google’s services (de-Google, anyone?), I strongly recommend going for a vanilla system instead of a Gapps one.

Now, as stated in MargotRobbie’s comment, one good use is as a media player. If you can sideload stuff like VLC and Librera Reader, you should be covered.

You can also use it for some lighter gaming, if that’s your thing, as there’s plenty of emulators, wrappers and engine implementations for Android.

You can also use it for running servers, if you do this sort of stuff.

And if you like to test around with softwares, a spare Android device is pretty good to have.

Got a gaming laptop some months ago, and it is actually very powerful indeed. But it came with Win11 by default, only requiring the final setup. Now… How can a system lag a decent laptop so much.

Needless to say, it didn’t take much for me to decide to swap for good ol’ Mint Xfce, and even try out a few other Linux systems, and now, pretty much everything runs flawlessly, at most requiring to avoid using the ultra settings.

But indeed, Windows is bloat incarnated, and it only gets worse. So much so it even feels like Win10 on a VM can clog the whole system. Weird how that doesn’t happen with Win7, no matter how long I leave it open on a VM.

Dunno when/how a game is classified a classic, but since PS2 is from the 6th gen, guess I have some suggestions! =D
Ultimate Ninja 5 is pretty cool, I think. Don’t like the anime much, but gameplay loop still feels pretty good nowadays. Only released on PAL and NTSC-J regions, though.
Dragon Ball - Budokai Tenkaichi 2 is also pretty fun, coming from someone that also doesn’t like the series it comes from.
I guess Godzilla: Unleashed could count as fighting game too? If so, I recommend it too.

I check sites that list hardware specs, and once I find a phone that seems interesting for an average price I’m willing to pay, I check places like XDA to know how much of a hassle it’ll be to unlock the bootloader and add a custom ROM. And if modding the phone has too many/too big drawbacks, I return to the first step until I find a phone that seems good.

I’d suggest Linux Mint.

• Simple UI
• (Xfce version specifically) is very fast (within reason; it’s still a modern OS)
• It’s already pretty keyboard-centric and it can be improved further if you like tinkering (my reason for dropping Windows was precisely lack of keyboard-centric controls, so if I stick to Mint, I guess it’s good on that front)
• Keys can be custom mapped, although I guess most bigger Linux systems allow that either out of the box, or through 3rd party software
• Unsure what a “dotfile” is, so can’t comment on that
• And Mint is still slowly adding animations to its functions (to some people’s dismay), and I don’t feel lag when alt-tabbing around, so I guess it is snappy too

Besides, Windows can be very laggy even on supported hardware.

Looking for a more stable distro could be a good idea. Some distros are pretty much only PoC, or too niche to have a good support, or the beta channel of another, better supported distro.

I don’t mind necro as long as it isn’t obvious spam, so don’t worry. =D
(besides, Reddit also had a lot of this, where pertinent replies would only appear a long time after the posts were made)

But thanks! The game looks pretty interesting, going by the promotional materials, and the store page also mentions it has both English and Japanese, so likely at least texts will be translated.

Xiaomi mobiles aren’t available in the US

Maybe the OP could import one? Or are there sanctions even for importing?

Oh. Oopsie. e.e"

Just checked. Initial release was in 2016. Maybe I confused it with a previous title from IF/CH.

Yup, like this!

Grid-based, dungeon crawler RPG (a mouthful, I know). The most recent titles in this genre I remember are the Mary Skelter trilogy, but the first game is about 10 years old already.

If you absolutely must get something from Google Play, I suggest Aurora Store, which acts as an alternative frontend for Google Play, so you don’t have to have GApps installed.

If you have use for command line programs, Termux, a terminal emulator, is a great option, and it also works with root.

For reading eBooks, I also have a recommendation, Librera Reader (but I’ll check the OP’s recommendation too).

Material Files and Simple File Manager are great file browsing tools. But if you need a file browser for root specifically, I recommend Material Files specifically.

I use LibreOffice’s Calc for tracking stuff.

…yes, adding data is a chore. But at least I don’t have a limit on platforms to add.