Is it still that bad huh? I had an A50 before and the bloat was one of the reasons I disliked that phone.

• Nobara for my gaming rig, same as OP + lots of out of the box gaming fixes.

• Tumbleweed for the laptop, rolling release while (in my experience) being a bit less likely to break than arch.

• Ubuntu/Debian/MicroOS/Alma for servers depending on whether I want stability + some fresher software, mountain-like stability, automatically updating container hosts or if I need redhat compatibility.

• Mint if its someone elses old computer they want to "just work", since I dislike being tech support more than necessary.

Okay, cool! Several people here seem to recommend it so I will add it to the "scale"

For new users this isn't really a problem though, but I agree with the sentiment

Yeah, that is one of the reasons I'm intrigued. Havent looked at it since the Rossman/Daniel Micay thing though, is it still good?

I appreciate the freedom feeling, bought a Pocophone F1 a couple years ago just to flash it with custom roms.

Have you tried Lineage? How would you compare the experience of using them if so? Some of the custom roms I've tried had some things I missed UX/functionality wise but as people seem quite happy with Graphene I assume it is nice to use.

For mobile games there is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, great time sink

Okay, good to know! Do you know whether banking etc is a problem on graphene or not? Last time I used custom roms I got it working with microg but I heard there might have been some regressions?

AnySoftKeyboard is a great FOSS one!

Was looking at the pixel 7 as well, but it is technically a hardware downgrade from my current zenfone 8. Very happy with the zenfone performance so a bit worried the 7 would feel sluggish, or at least slower..

Great minds think alike! (Or the availability of compact phones with more than 2 years of software updates is unfortunately small)

Ah cool, waiting for the pixel 8a might be an interesting option as well assuming they release it within a couple of months

How do you find the battery life? The ultra looks interesting (I feel I would get good use out of the pen), but sadly a bit too expensive for me to consider it good value.

Good point