Despite Międzyzdroje (zachodniopomorskie, Poland) lying directly at the seaside, the air quality in winter is so bad it literally irritates the throat and can even give you headaches or make you nauseous, and only directly on the beach can you still breathe fresh air.
The common argument is that people use bad furnaces or burn bad fuel or trash out of poverty, but far too often the actual cause is mentality and not financial issues.
Smog kills around 40,000 Polish people each year. [1] It was reported in 2025 to be 20 times more than in car accidents. [2]
On the bright side, industrial and post-apo art fans can wear breathing masks in Poland without even pretending.
AFAIR, I got refunded the whole tablet price in the end - I think half the price immediately, and the other half a few years later. It doesn't mean others were refunded too, of course. It was long time ago, though, so I may have mixed something up.
It's in a different league as it's a linux phone first and foremost, not degoogled/hardened android, you get full root access as a checkbox in settings that will install terminal app for you to hack to your heart's content, user having root access is not an attack vector for them
I was not asking about having terminal and root access. I was asking about security-wise parity, for example memory protection, full "disk" encryption, permission model, application sandboxing etc. This is the main selling point of GrapheneOS. This and Android application compatibility, but Sailfish OS has its Android compatibility layer too.
Same experience here, though from Sailfish OS run on their first Jolla phone.
Also permission model on Sailfish was much worse than on Android. I didn't use Android apps on Sailfish, though.
I really liked Silica UI, but available apps had much less functionality than their counterparts on Android and iOS. I think that open sourcing Sailfish and Silica would end up better for them.
Nevertheless, I kinda liked the phone, but ultimately went back to Android.
Yup, in Poland, a mobile phone number (pre-paid or not, it doesn't matter) is tied to a PESEL number [1] at the time of purchase. The official justification, as usual, was combating crime, but the end result is a tighter grip on citizens' privacy by the government while spammers and others continue their business as usual.
PSP S.A. is expanding abroad, so perhaps BLIK will be available in more countries in some time: "In September, the first BLIK transaction was made in Slovakia, and BLIK Romania S.A. received authorization from the National Bank of Romania to operate in the country. In November, the Polish Payments Standard transformed into a joint stock company, to support the execution of its strategic goals." [1] [2]
BLIK has one ugly caveat, though: it has no chargeback procedure.
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