GenderNeutralBro

Yes, the issue persists even with all of that enabled. I don't understand why.

I had a similar issue on my previous phone, but never on my Pixel before. So I guess Google specifically does something extra.

Google Wallet (or whatever they call it these days) doesn't work, even if you install Google Play Services. So NFC payments are simply not possible for me. I've heard that some banks have NFC payments built into their apps, but I have never seen a list. I'd switch banks if it meant I could get this to work.

There's currently no NLP (network location provider) support, so if you don't have an actual GPS satellite signal, you will not have active location unless you use Google's location services. There's been some talk of including a new NLP service in the future but I don't know of any timeline.

Even when using Google Location Services, accuracy is worse than on the stock Pixel OS. I'm not sure why, but I get tons of drift indoors (whether Wi-Fi is enabled or not), whereas on PixelOS it was almost always stable. It also means navigation apps will sometimes think I magically hopped off a bridge and onto the side street below or something like that.

There's no "extreme battery saver" mode like on Google's Pixel OS. When I switched, I didn't realize that was a Google feature rather than an Android/AOSP feature.

If you rely on Google backups for app data, I'm not sure if there's any reasonable way to get that into GOS since it can only happen during initial setup. Might be solutions to this, but personally I didn't spend time on it because there was nothing I cared too much about. Check your apps to see if they have settings import/export functions. A lot of open-source apps (like Lemmy clients) do.

GOS has an open-source backup system called Seedvault, but of course if you ever want to switch back to a stock Android OS, you won't be able to bring those backups with you since apps simply can't get that level of access on any stock Android OS. You're stuck on GOS or other third-party OSes that support Seedvault, or maybe rooting if that's possible.

If you use WhatsApp (ew), be aware that it only supports backup via Google Drive. And you can't manually download and restore that backup without adding Google Play Services and logging in.

Lawnchair and other third-party home screens seem to work worse on GOS than stock Pixel OS when it comes to the app switcher animation bug. I've seen some GOS forum threads about this so I know I'm not alone.

Yes, his name is Headmaster Gandalf.

I used that briefly 10+ years ago when I got a Fire Stick for like $5. I even installed it on one of my phones back then, since they had a lot of app giveaways and I was dumb.

It was basically "Google Play but worse". Like the Epic Games Store is to Steam.

DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn't use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

I don't think there's any simple answer to what's beginner-friendly, because so much is hardware-dependent. They mentioned obscure laptop hardware, and at that point I wouldn't even make a recommendation to someone beyond "see if any distros have a wiki page about that specific hardware, and search for forum threads about it".

I'm sure there are cases when Arch is a lot easier than Mint. I'm not sure why they dismissed Fedora out of hand, though. What's wrong with Fedora?

No love for cvs?

And that's the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!

Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it's "fine" but it doesn't solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.

Honestly, that sounds great.

My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it's not always easy to tell what's official and what's just from some rando. I don't want a repo full of "unverified" packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.

Distros can and should curate packages. That's half the point of a distro.

And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can't simply patch a library once at the system level.

I'm running a Fedora derivative and I wasn't even aware of this option. I'm going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.

The legality is also questionable. It seems, currently, there is no law specifically forbidding changing the IMEI of a device you own, but it’s definitely a gray area.

So...in what way is this a gray area?

Awesome, thanks!

Google Pixel hardware isn’t great

This is true, but if you're coming from a Galaxy S8, a Pixel 9 will be a significant upgrade in performance. More comparable to an S21 or S22 as far as cpu performance goes.