That was my experience as well. 2 hard drives, so I thought, why not dual boot? Surely, I’d need windows for some reason or another.

6 months later, I realized the same thing - I have a 1 TB drive doing nothing. I nuked it and never looked back.

Oh, neat! Message received: if I eat enough beans, I can be my own creme brulee torch!

For me it was more about updates installing junk I didn’t ask for, undoing configurations I’ve made, and resetting my menu customizations.

Otherwise I agree - updates never actually broke my system. They just made me not want to use it anymore.

Great! 👍

That’s fair. Privacy and security generally come at some cost of convenience. Everyone has their own personal balance.

Not currently. It will require Google to’allow’ tap-to-pay on Graphene. Other NFC functions work fine.

For my use, it’s not a big deal. Tapping my card is easy enough

Exploit Protection Compatibility Mode. It’s a setting that relaxes this particular security enhancement for a given app.

It’s worth knowing that NFC payments do not work with Graphene currently.

While this tends to be true, the vast majority of the banking app incompatibilities are overcome with a simple app-specific toggle.

Hell yeah fuck yeah. Thank you, Canada!

I’d lean toward the way you have it now. I like having the owner profile as my daily driver. Any app that I have doubts about gets its own profile.

If you haven’t already, check out the Graphene forum and search for profiles. There have been lots of discussions about this, and you’ll find some good examples for various privacy/security needs.

I’ve had the opposite experience. I’m on a Pixel 8 running Graphene. So far today (8.5 hours since last charge), I’m at 87%. The screen time meter says 90 minutes of screen time since last charge. I’ve been running Bluetooth for about 4 hours, and WiFi full time.

I’d typically be under 60% at this point when I was on stock Android.

I have to ask… Are you actually happy with Kodi? Did you find a way to make it more usable?

I set it up on a RPi, got Netflix and Amazon working on it, and I really, REALLY wanted to like it…

But I just can’t. The interface is awful. The sorting is nonsensical. You have to manually enable thumbnails. You can change it, but you have to change it for every interface. And then it doesn’t remember, so you have to go through all that again the next time you use it.

Sorry if I sound whiny, but I’d love to know if you got it to be more usable than I could.

Me too. I have a Brother printer. When I first set it up, Windows printed everything in inverse black and white until I hunted down the correct driver. Windows also never figured out how to wake it up, so I always had to manually wake it up. And it simply never worked with the scanner.

Linux got everything right without me having to fuss with anything.

Consider grabbing a bar normally. You’d probably have 4 fingers on one side, and your thumb on the other. Now move the thumb so it’s on the same side of the bar as your fingers. That’s a thumbless grip. Not really thumbless, but your thumb is doing much less than it normally would.

The grip is popular for the low bar squat because it puts your wrists in a better position. It’s also a popular bench press grip for folks who want a caved-in face.

I’ve been using Graphene for a few weeks now. I’m really happy with it. That said, I’m a pretty minimal smartphone user. I don’t use NFC or any AI or Assistant features.

My only hiccup was my banking app didn’t work at first. Luckily their documentation is informative and easy to read. This is a common problem with a simple solution… You just need to change a toggle in the app control setting.

Installation is super easy if you use their web installer - just read through the procedure first, follow it exactly, and be patient. There are a few places where you think it’s done, but if you interrupt it, the install can go sideways.

It’s also easy to revert back to stock if you want to. And it doesn’t void your warranty - I just RMAd my pixel 8 after it developed the pink stripe syndrome.