@Elowan you have to know the exact name of the package. If you go through "install deb package", that is. For example gimp is "gimp", no capital letters. If you're unsure, check the internet for the package name at least that's what I do.

@mihael Nice ! But modifying swap settings involves remounting the filesystem in writable, right ? Did you have to reinstall everything after each new OTA or did it go smoothly ?

@dobey "Phones/tablets do not have much (if any) swap enabled by default, because flash based storage has a limited number of writes in its lifetime, and using swap on such storage can greatly reduce the lifespan of the storage when apps get shoved into swap" Here is why I don't wan't to do it in the end. I bought a fairphone to have a low impact on the ecosystem. If I kill memory just to be able to use the phone it just means the OS is not ready, and this phone is going to sit still until this founds a fix...

@mihael Ok then, all hail the swap ! I'll do that. But it highlights the two main seemingly inextricable problems of touch: being read-only, and depending on android...

At the present, I have only one app opened (morph) and just this page opened on it. And yet top tells me my phone (FP2) is currently using circa 95% of it's 2gb memory. I thought I had got rid of random reboots by patching the firmware a while ago, but I had three (unity8 reboots, that is) reboots in ten minutes of checking mails and surfing the internet. I was coming to terms with the idea of using the FP2 without flashlight but this renders it fully unusable. How come ? I've had Ubuntu 16 desktop versions running better on computers with that much ram (and I mean DDR2 crap ) - it didn't run seamless but at least didn't crash the Gui ! plus the swap partition is almost always full which I guess means swapiness is set on 10 which given the default size of the swap partition is ludicrous. I will eventually set a more appropriate swap size and trigger myself but my understanding is that ut should stay read-only and I would like to know the rationale behind these settings... But, mostly I wonder: why this ram usage ? and why does it lead to unity restarting ? What I like about Linux in general is its conservative use of ressources and this looks weird to me.

Yeah obviously the FP2 has a lot of problems of its own, that are definitely not specific to UT, and be not mistaken, I had a great experience with this OS and am not reverting to Android; it's just that pooky asked about the FP2, and here is its current state of porting ^^

@Pookie
One thing to know about UT in the present day is that it's also quite sluggish compared to android for example - apps take a long time to launch (especially camera app, which is annoying) even those you'd assume are "light", like Notes. Also, I own a FP2 and I don't recommend using UT as a daily drive on it - since i bought it a couple of months ago it sits nicely on a desk, waiting for the time three main problems are fixed: there are some random reboots, even though nothing like that happened since OTA-11 (fingers crossed) ; brightness management still means you have to wait 10 whole seconds for the phone to lock if brightness is up (known issue); and finally the flashlight doesn't work (known issue). Everything else works perfectly, anbox and Libertine are impressively functional, the interface is fast and intuitive, and no apps ever gave me trouble. I could do with a bit of sluggishness and locking issues, but the flashlight is something I need on a daily basis at work, so I can't yet shift to this phone.

I use the "music recognition" app and it works flawlessly. Go for it ! follow the -somewhat intricate- instructions to run the API and here you go

will do ! didn't know you could actually extract zip with the file manager. That's nice.