Hi all. My Samsung S20 finally gave out after 6 years and I needed a new phone, so I got a Pixel 9 Pro with GrapheneOS! It’s been a blast learning all of the various new features I haven’t had access to. What are some “newer” things that you have been taking advantage of?
Nothing. Besides hardware (better battery life, faster, etc.) only software has “improved”. There are a lot of “AI” features now in most standard ROMs, that’s what Google and Samsung have worked on mostly the last years, because they ran out of ideas and these gimmicks look like innovation.
But this doesn’t affect you, since GrapheneOS is pretty barebones by default. And that’s good. I don’t want this shit, I just want a debloated phone.
Now, enjoy your great camera, longer lasting battery and way better performance :)
Edit: If you want to get the “new phone feeling”, check out Kvaesitso. It’s my absolutely favourite FOSS home screen and very innovative and different from what you’re already used to. With your new phone, you can now enjoy the very smooth animations and features. That might make it less boring ;)
Edit edit: Also check out theming. Material You might look fresh and interesting to you. Play around with color schemes and see what you like.
If you are a technical user, the new-ish Linux Terminal is cool. It’s a full Linux VM that you can run on an Android phone. It can even run graphical Wayland apps through Weston. You can enable it by enabling developer settings and then flipping the Linux Terminal toggle. After that, there will be an app called Terminal.
Wow, awesome! Didn’t know that, thanks! :)
Kvaesitso is awesome! I like having an uncluttered home screen and simply searching for all my apps, since that’s what I normally do anyways with a normal launcher
I actually don’t have good battery, maybe that’s cause of google play services