Switching From Xiaomi Mi Band 4 to Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

I was having issues with my Mi Band 4, it has been very flaky. For a month it would not connect to my Pixel 8a and then it started working again but a bit on and off. Anyway, I have got fed up with the unreliability of Xiaomi devices so I decided to look for something to replace it. I've also been wanting to get a few more features, but they usually come at a higher price. I spotted a first gen Pixel Watch practically new on Facebook Marketplace but ruled that out as apparently the battery life on those is atrocious. I also wanted a traditional looking round faced watch and so I ended up looking at Samsung smartwatches. I found a Galaxy Watch 4 in a Cash Converters for just 40 quid which seems to be in good condition, boxed with charger and a spare strap, a metal one, so I bought it.

Setup was a bit of a faff as it needed a bunch of Samsung apps installed to get full functionality, but it got there eventually. The one main annoyance after first setup was it kept asking to sign in to the Samsung account even after it was already setup, this seemed to be a known bug, but thankfully installing the latest update to the watch fixed it.   

Charging is much nicer than on the Xiaomi Bands, instead of physical connectors, the Samsung uses a little circular wireless charging pad that you sit the watch on.  Just make sure the Watch is placed correctly, it will show a progress bar when charging. From 5% to fully charged it took nearly two hours on the very first charge. When the battery gets very low it goes into watch-only mode. However I generally don't let it get too low, I usually charge it only once a day and usually for less than an hour, when I need to take it off to wash my hair, for example. That's not bad considering it has a lot more features than the old dumb Xiaomi. 

I don't really need a lot of the Health stuff other than steps/miles - it's good to have a  map at the end of a long walk, I used to do that manually with Google Maps Timeline. I don't use kilometres so I had to change that in settings. Open the Samsung Health app, tap the three dots or "More" icon, go to Settings, then select Units of measurement and change the distance to "Miles". I also find the sleep tracking useful too. I've found and installed some nice Watch faces from Google Play too. 

I've switched it to use Google Assistant instead of Bixby, although Assistant seems to have been replaced by Google Gemini which is not so good. Some Wear apps like the Blood Pressure one require a Samsung phone to work. 

I love being able to skip tracks on my music player using my watch, whether that's Poweramp on my phone or the music player on my laptop or desktop using KDE Connect. Since the phone can control whatever player is in use on KDE, it means my watch can control it too. And if you turn the dial of the watch, it controls the volume of whatever is playing.

Another neat trick is with the Google Camera app on the watch I can get my phone to take a photo whilst seeing roughly what the phone's camera is seeing on my phone, albeit squashed into a round display area.  Another thing i only discovered after weeks of use, is the edge of the watch is a rotary dial like a 'proper' watch, and it flicks between functions the same as swiping. 

Anyway all told, I'm happy with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, it's great for the low price they are secondhand. I'm still getting major updates to Android Wear on it, and I'll probably use this watch until the battery wears out, then buy a newer version. 

   

From Kubuntu LTS to Fedora 43 KDE on my Dell Latitude 7300

I was having some weird issues on Kubuntu LTS on my Dell Latitude 7300, so I decided to try Fedora KDE, since I had read that KDE support has improved a lot in Fedora recently. It's also been awhile since I tried Fedora. I also wanted a newer version of KDE than Kubuntu without going for KDE Neon. I am hoping that it will be more stable than Neon.

As with most modern distros, it's pretty easy to install and doesn't take too long, especially on a reasonably powered machine like this one. This is what I was greeted with on the first login. It's a fairly stock looking KDE other than Fedora Kicker icon and becomes more stock when you apply a default KDE theme. Breeze Dark is always my usual choice for KDE. I think it uses the same or close to the same version of KDE Plasma desktop as KDE Neon, which is always a fair bit newer than Kubuntu LTS. On the plus side it should have a fair few things fixed, but it may be a little bleeding edge.

And here's how I set it up, I have added more virtual desktops, moved the panel to the top and changed the theme to Breeze Dark. This is pretty much how I setup KDE on all my machines.

Apart from web browsing, (using Chrome, there's an rpm available on Google's download page) I mostly use my laptop for image editing with GIMP and a little bit of video editing with Kdenlive.  To get libx264 output working, I did a bit of Googling and installed the RPMfusion repos and installed libavcodec.

Once I did that, Kdenlive could now export to x264 video, and many other options. Updates on the KDE edition of Fedora are handled by KDE's Discover, just like Kubuntu, or on the command line using dnf instead of apt, using these commands to first check for updates and then install them: 

sudo dnf check-update 

sudo dnf upgrade   

I've installed all my usual apps such as Audacious for playing music, VLC and MPV for video playing,  and Soundkonverter for converting media along with qbittorrent and Filezilla. One slight annoyance I had was sending a file to my Android devices with KDE Connect failed for some reason. I disabled the firewall in case that was the issue but that did not work, but then it  turned out that it was SELinux being too restrictive. Disabling it or turning it down a bit will do the job, allowing KDE Connect to work. To disable SELinux, edit /etc/selinux/config with your favourite text editor and set SELINUX=disabled and then save, exit and reboot. Also Mkchromecast (for casting audio to Chromecasts) is not available in the Fedora repos and there appears to be no other way of installing it, except perhaps compiling it from source which I really cannot be bothered with.

Another slight annoyance I have had is getting used to a much newer version of the image editor, GIMP, as the devs for some silly reason have made it so that the default paste is now as a single layer, rather than a floating layer, which is now in the paste sub-menu. "Paste into selection" is now "Paste as floating layer into selection" - very inconvenient!  GIMP has also crashed several times, mainly when it's been left open for a long time, especially between Suspend and Resume. Also, GIMP no longer remembers the last font used in the text tool.

So far, Fedora 43 KDE has been performing much better than my many previous attempts at using Fedora, usually I use it for a few days and find it to be too buggy or there's a big showstopping bug that drives me back to my previous distro.  It's been around 4 months now and I'm still using it and everything is working fine so far, a lot more stable than when I have previously used Fedora.  It's unusual that the only annoying issue I have with this Fedora version is actually just an issue with the latest GIMP and mkchromecast not being available.