BB10 is nice. Meego, as seen in the Nokia N9 was a really good UI too. Extremely elegant card interface, that meshed so well with a curved OLED screen. In 2011.

I would love to see an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly. One way to go would be a better F-Droid ecosystem, and pure AOSP.

But perhaps, even better, a true Linux userland. Maemo lives on with Jolla. Although I hate they still have many closed components.

Sailfish is the OS that runs on Jolla and nowadays also on the Xperia X and XA2 phones, although I heard it is not really available in the US (why?).

It's somewhat of an alternative to iOS & Android and feels like running Linux 20 years ago. You are making it harder on yourself.

Running Android apps with microg installed on it provides a decent fallback.

Maybe the Purism Librem 5? https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

The UI is still very much a work in progress, though. But it's fully open source. Based on GNOME.

To my knowledge, this is based on Plasma Mobile which shares some features from the KDE Plasma desktop environment and uses Qt for widgets.

https://www.plasma-mobile.org/

How the buttons that are always there cumbersome?

I personally don't like gestures. You have to remember and get used to them. Then suddenly in a major update they will change everything to new "cooler" gesture, re-learn and get used to it again. Year after year that happens.

Compare that to buttons. You can always see them, so no need to remember anything. Older people also able to use them.

Of course new shiny mobile os have mixed both together and now we are guinea pigs of modern UI.

I'm with you. I couldn't make gestures into something that was good for me. My current phone lacks physical buttons (except for power and volume up/down), and I've never stopped missing them -- it's my #1 complaint about the phone.

The android buttons in most cases these days are not hard buttons but soft ones that could just as likely change at the whim of Android, using your own hypothetical situation you came up with. They are cumbersome because usually it takes two hands to press them, as they are small buttons at the bottom. You end up needing one hand to hold the phone and the other to accurately press the button. With thumb-gestures, you can do it blindfolded in one hand. In addition, the buttons take up screen real estate.

Also, have you actually used the BlackBerry gestures? Upon getting a BlackBerry, the very first thing it does is a 1 minute tutorial explaining how to use the gestures. There are only a few. They really aren't complicated. They just take a brief explanation and the reward is you get a more functional interface.

Agreed!

I was a BB Classic user for about 2 years before jumping ship to iOS for practical reasons.

Aside from what you mentioned, I would also bring up that, at least on the Classic, the little touch nub/joystick/trackpad thing was actually incredibly handy. It could act as a mouse, which meant that you could use "Desktop" websites very easily, since you didn't have to try to fat finger tiny little buttons. And since it was essentially a real mouse, hovering worked to, which is nice for sites that required that.

For those that have never seen one, it was a small button, about the size of an iPhone home button, but the surface doubled as a capactive trackpad, I assume with similar tech to those used in laptops, but far more sensitive. I still used the touch-screen a fair amount, but having a mouse was wonderful when you needed it.

The hardware on the Classic was just fantastic... long battery life, good build quality, and a SIM+microSD slot.

I totally wish my Q10 had a trackpad. They are very handy.

> And you are also less likely to lose track of what windows you have open. I find lots of peoples android phones have like 30 windows open - this is a fault of its interface.

There is no need to keep track of them or close them, since the app lifecycle is managed automatically by the system – having a window (called activity on Android) open doesn't mean that the app is running.

Non-foreground activities are automatically suspended by the system and resumed when you return to them. Processes with suspended activites are automacially killed when resources run low.

That does not at all change the fact that the user ends up with a mess of open windows, regardless of whether they are burdening the OS.

Who owns BB10? Are they any more able to do business with Huawei than Google?

I share a similar feeling, but coming from Symbian and WP.