Daily Driving Woes

clicker

I'm on Xenial and I've been daily driving for a couple months now. Overall I'm generally happy with the performance (I know it's "outdated"), but a handful of things still irk me:

The finicky lock screen. If you saw my post in here https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1010/lock-screen-doesn-t-lock/6, I've run into what appears to be a longstanding issue (2018-2025). Unless I can find a solution, I feel a lot more vulnerable now than I did with an iPhone.
The inconsistent alarm bugs. https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/982. Sometimes alarms I set will ring, sometimes they wont. It is so inconsistent, I cannot rely on the phone to announce alarms whatsoever. This unreliability means I cannot confidently use the phone as an alarm.
Libertine did not want to play nice with the command line utility I wanted... nothing but errors. Couldn't find any solutions online.
Unencrypted partitions... I've read a few threads (such as this one https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1012/one-method-to-encrypt-home-phablet) but it also seems a bit finicky... I'd be more inclined to encrypt the phone if there were a method more "officially" supported, perhaps baked-in like how some desktop installs have options for luks.

I guess I'm open to investing in new hardware if the lock screen is more solid and alarms are reliable on a newer release... But if these bugs from 2018, or similarly annoying newer bugs, are still persistent today, on a current release, I can't help but feel a mainstream iPhone/Android is the better option as a daily driver. I've been developing a new app in my spare time and I almost feel like my time would be better spent investigating the alarm bug or something. Can anyone talk on their experience with Focal, or perhaps bestow any "little known tricks" for these old bugs I'm dealing with on Xenial?

Keneda

@clicker
What is your device?
Did you try reinstalling with ubports installer to fix your locking issue?

kugiigi

First of all, it'll be really hard to address your concerns since you're in xenial which is outdated for more than a year now. The bugs you encountered might already be fixed but will never be fixed in xenial. Also please tell us which device you have. It may also be possible that your device have a port that is unmaintained or not in good quality.

I've never encountered your issue with the lockscreen and alarm. Perhaps you used passwd to change your password? You shouldn't do that since the settings app does something else and the system expects those. I've been using my UT device for my alarms for a decade now and I don't remember it failing. We don't have any complexities in time such as daylight savings though which perhaps causes these issues?

As for Libertine, it really is under-developed and never found it reliable. It works for some cases but definitely not with GUI apps.

For encryption, someone has experimented with it but nothing official yet. At the end of the day, someone has to put the effort on it but so far no one succeeded yet.