That’s odd, I installed the Gemini app on my 6a like a week ago. Unless you’re specifically talking about grapheneOS.

I tried bazzite, unfortunately I had some odd quirks that I can only attribute to an immutable OS. Things like window and UI scaling wasn’t consistent. My mouse cursor would blow up to twice the size when hovering over one window then shrink back down on another. I can only guess this is because the base filesystem is only readable and it can’t write any values for scaling on certain themes/window decorations. While not a huge deal, it comes off as sloppy and inconsistent. It’s not a great user experience and first impressions are everything. It’s easy to make a first impression, it’s damn near impossible to make a second one, and my first impression of an immutable OS has been soured. I installed mint 22 and it’s been a completely different experience, from window decorations, to time shift backups, system updates, Bluetooth, cinnamon theming, it just works out of the box with little to no setup.

Yeah it’s fine, there are a ton of pop_os fanboys out there, I’m just stating a fact. System76 complained about the gnome 40 changes over and over and the gnome devs ignored them, their only option was to make their own DE or use something else and they clearly didn’t want to be at the mercy of another group of developers. I’m excited for cosmic as a true original DE in the style of gnome, but at the same time it’s going to be rough around the edges because it’s new.

I’m not sure smart is the right thing to say here, system76 backed themselves into a corner by criticizing gnome. They either had to do their own thing or put up with it, they clearly decided to do their own thing and show gnome how they think a DE should be managed. However there are other ways to handle it and Linux mint has done an amazing job with cinnamon and mate.

Currently have a 6a, the fingerprint sensor was garbage when I first got it but Google really did some work to improve it over the years. It’s not perfect but it works.

Come on now, that’s not just a Google problem and you know it, no need to shit on Google for something damn near every tech company does. Google does their fair share of shitty things, this isn’t really one of them.

While I liked Niagara for what it tries to do, it’s price for a launcher was steep, and Nova IMHO is not a good company to emulate. May I ask why the need to join the Google group?

Make it open source and don’t charge for a “premium” version when it’s fully released that will hamstring your capability if you don’t pay.

Very stock Android, but they use older hardware for these phones and it shows. I had a moto g power, at one point it had to install updates and when it rebooted it sat at a blank home screen for ten minutes before showing any icons. I ditched Android altogether and went iPhone, but I heard really good things about pixel phones, so I switched back and gave my old phones to my kids.

So me not wanting to upgrade my pixel 6a to a pixel 8 because it works just fine is a problem for the global Smartphone economy? Fuck these guys. I want hardware that lasts and doesn’t end up in a landfill. I don’t give a shit if these executives can’t buy a third yacht or another tennis court in their back yard, I’m going to stick with what works. The hypocrisy of these kinds of articles is disgusting at best and immoral at worst.

Same, just started using Niagara actually, it’s really good.

Part of the issue is that the biggest smartphone manufacturers are all sister companies to each other. Oppo, OnePlus, xaiomi, they’re all different companies under the same banner, so they’re bound to share hardware specs and manufacturing.

Personally I think nothing phone is the only phone brand that’s innovating on design with the candy bar style phone, but even that’s hard to justify. Samsung has been repeating the folding phone designs and refining them year after year and Google has been pretty lazy with the pixel phones in regards to hardware.

It’s a weird time for smartphones, can’t push more power without destroying batteries, can’t really innovate with batteries because we’ve hit a wall that only software can help mitigate. Not only that’s we all apparently want bigger and bigger phones, and the only way to realistically get that is with folding display tech, which again chews up battery power.

That’s great, then I stand corrected. I don’t use pop on a regular basis so please don’t think I’m trying to insult your work, simply stating the perception from the outside. Clearly that’s not the case and I’m in the wrong. I also didn’t know you rebuild the ISOs every week as again, I don’t use pop regularly.

China absolutely steals, my company had a data breach about a year ago, the bad actors were traced back to a Chinese competitor. Thankfully they didn’t get any of our IP, but they were specifically looking for IP to steal. It’s a known thing, China simply steals and uses shitty materials to make substandard products, they’ve been doing it for decades.

Mint is based on LTS and they release two versions a year and update their package base. I respect what the pop_os guys are doing, which I guess includes you, we need more modern DE’s besides gnome and KDE. I know what LTS is, it’s just odd that you guys haven’t updated pop_os for over a year, and the last time I used an OS that did the same thing, Solus, the whole project went to shit. I’m on endeavourOS now, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the progress of cosmic hoping to see an updated version of pop because I genuinely love the style and look of the OS. If you’re updating packages and keeping up to date on as many packages as possible then I definitely retract my original post.

Fair enough, but why is pop_os almost two full OS releases behind Ubuntu?

They’re spending all of their time and effort on cosmic. This is why I don’t recommend Pop_os to anyone anymore, not until cosmic is complete and released to the public.

Okay, I’m running an arch Linux install as a daily driver with multiple open source application alternatives to proprietary software, but yes, I have no idea how open source works…come on…I’m done with this conversation.

I literally gave your proof that Google owns Android… You’re clearly not willing to accept that simple fact. You can fork it, go ahead, but Google still owns it, you’re never gonna get away from that fact.

Google owns Android https://www.scaler.com/topics/which-company-owns-the-android-operating-system/

It’s licensed under an Apache open source license and is co-developed with Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). Google’s Android team is the primary developer and maintainer of the OS.