Apparently not according to the other comments here, but I absolutely love Material You now that a lot of apps support it. Not having every app have its own color scheme just feels comfortable and IMHO makes a lot of sense together with the system-wide dark mode.

Also, the app drawer always has unthemed icons, the themed ones are only for the home screen where I like to keep the few apps that I use often, so not having a colorful mess for a home screen is a bigger plus for me than losing the ability to recognize them at a glance, because I know exactly where on the home screen they are anyway.

I mean, first there was the 4a with its software update that rendered affected batteries nearly useless, then the battery recall for 7a, and now there are apparently some restrictions for the 6a in the new update

TL;DR: the minimum went from 16 to 32 GB

Nah, the kernel isn’t that important for apps - you can replace the kernel and update the massive Android framework to work with the new one relatively easily (you will need some Linux compatibility for native code that does syscalls on its own, but that’s pretty much it - even WSL1 could do that).

It’s all the APIs and system apps provided by Google that have no reasonable alternative in AOSP that are the problem for compatibility. Look how incomplete projects like MicroG (an open-source implementation of Google Play Services) are, and their only goal is to provide Android compatibility for unofficial ROMs without installing the proper Google services.

Sure, but I don’t see how any of that disproves the current “M$ supremacy” for “normies” - the fact is that people who couldn’t care less about how their computers work will have a much easier time using Windows (and probably macOS) than any Linux distro. You don’t have to worry that some software won’t be available to you because of your choice of the OS, and if you ever have a problem it’s easy to find help.

I haven’t used Windows in a decade on my personal computers, but as long as these two things hold true, it will always be my recommended OS for people who simply don’t care - I’m not going to spend my time doing free IT support for everyone I know and then get blamed everytime something doesn’t work.

Annoying warning keeps showing up at boot -> bring the PC to the nearest computer-literate person, and they’ll fix it. Good luck doing the same if you use Linux.

As far as I know, bootloader locks are done by the manufaturer not by the provider.

Verizon requires the phones they sell to NOT have the ability to unlock the bootloader. That’s why there are separate factory images for Verizon Pixels.

The package name is visible in App info, no need to install anything - just long press the app icon, pick App info and scroll down to version

Google Drive app -> New (in the bottom right corner) -> Scan. It’s not supposed to be a part of the camera app, that’s just a useful shortcut.

Don’t be ridiculous - this is a lab environment, they can faithfully recreate the suffering as long as the ethics committee doesn’t get notified.

That sounds like Xiaomi. The best price to performance ratio of any OEM, but at the cost of terrible software and this… experience… when you want to get rid of it.

Worth noting that not all OEMs are like this.