From e284bbff1b160f644f56ab1549cb4987bbdeb328 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: will This is the laptop I upgraded from to my current PC. It's got an Intel i7-9750H, 16GB of RAM (upgraded from
8GB stock), 256GB of SSD space, and a GTX 1660Ti Max-Q GPU. It's currently running Ubuntu server. Right now
- I'm using it to run a Minecraft server for some friends.Peripherals
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It's fairly mediocre, but it's not like I'm doing anything important on it. The standout feature for me is - the headphone jack. That, above all else, remains non-negotiable for me. I intend to keep using it until it - becomes unusable or breaks, then replace it with something I can install a custom ROM on.
+I said I was going to wait until my old LG K61 became unusable before replacing it. I thought I'd failed to do that right up until + its replacement, a used flagship from nearly three years ago, arrived and blew it out of the water in almost every way. I never noticed + up until now just how painfully unresponsive my old phone was. Mobile websites are, like, usable now!
+Performance was never a consideration in buying the phone, though. I'm not a huge fan of the idea of using a Google device, but the Pixel line are the only devices supported by + Graphene OS, possibly the single most secure and private mobile OS currently on the market short of full fat Linux on something like a Pinephone. + It's got a number of nice features: the OS has been fully stripped of all of Google's slimy little rootkit tentacles, and even if you do need + to install Google Play Services for something like an app that relies on it for push notifications, it's as aggressively sandboxed as any other app. + That's another thing - Graphene has powerful per-app permission settings, allowing you to turn off network and even hardware sensor access for apps you + don't trust, and every app you download has almost no permissions by default. I'll stop gushing about it here now, Graphene's features page has its own comprehensive overview.
+So I kind of had to get a Pixel if I wanted Graphene, but why the 4a in particular? There are more recent, largely better models within my price range. + Mainly, I chose to get the specific model I did because it was the last Pixel device to be released with two important attributes: the presence of a headphone jack, + and the lack of 5G support. The headphone jack, I think, is self-explanatory. I never intend to purchase a phone without one if I can avoid it. As for the 5G, I don't trust it. + Basically, much of the performance improvement 5G offers comes from a new transmission technique called beam forming, where instead of blasting every signal equally in all directions + like a radio tower it specifically calibrates the signal for a given device such that it's effectively focused in a narrow cone directed at that device, and for this to work properly + the tower needs to know where the phone is at a level of precision that is within inches. I feel like I shouldn't need to explain why that's scary. +
+Yeah, so in summary, phone's good, installation process is easy, I recommend it if you can deal with the small amount of jank caused by the Android ecosystem's dependency on Google Rootkit Play Services.