Torn between getting the Pixel 5 & waiting for the CalyxOS to support the Pixel 6 once it’s released. No idea how long the latter would take?
That’s a hard call
I know! Would feel weird to buy a new phone and then think, “now I’ll just leave this in the box for the next few months”.
Yes. Perhaps you might be able to get in touch with the developer to see if there is a time plan for the support of the new pixel. He seems to be pretty active over at their Matrix room.
Just had a quick dig around on a couple of their matrix channels. Couldn’t see anything indicating timelines. Reddit folk think a minimum of 4 months from release. Think I’ll just get the Pixel 5 for now.
You don’t go wrong with a pixel 5 + CalyxOS.
I just won an ebay auction for a pixel 3xl to try CalyxOS on - I need to make sure I can still do my job with it before I bust out many hundreds of bucks on a phone I may not be able to use.
But I’m really excited to try!
Thankfully, I don’t need mine for my job. It’s more just usual smartphone stuff. Also, excited to try.
As an interesting side note, GrapheneOS now supports direct use of the Play Store on their OS.
It and the various Play services are sandboxed off from the rest of the OS, but you can sign into it and use all of your paid apps.
Now to be fair, you can do that with the Aurora Store on CalyxOS, but Google could ban you from using the Play store for using your account through a 3rd party app.
Still prefer Calyx overall, but I’m liking Graphene a lot more than I used to, as I can actually use the likes of GCam mods now.
Interesting. Makes the choice less clear cut.
It does. Note that GrapheneOS has 3 installers on their website to install the Play store stuff, as they don’t package it as a part of the base rom.
Does GrapheneOS still have the long application launch time thing?
I’ve not run into it, and I’ve had Graphene on my Pixel 5 a few times now.
How does it compare to CalyxOS in terms of performance? The only video I could find was quite old.
Much of a muchness tbh. The biggest factor in performance will be the phone specs themselves tbh. I’ve noticed neither being slower than the other.
Just bought a Sony Xperia 1 second-hand for £150. It’s a 2 year old phone that was originally £850 when new. Yeah it’s Android & Googled but I’m not bothered about it. I’m locked down with most of Google’s stuff as much as you can be (I know it’s not bullet-proof so no lectures please!). It was the first phone released with a 4k OLED screen, you should see the screen, it puts all my computer monitors to shame, bloody gorgeous!
I had been using an old Samsung S4 mini running Android 4.4 for the last 7 years. Now I have Android 11. I am amazed how far Android has progressed in that time. So many options and configurations to figure out though, it’s gonna take me a week to get it customized to how I like it. A bit like setting up a new KDE DE on an unfamiliar distro! Good fun though!
I know a lot of folk don’t rate Xperia phones very highly, but I checked it out thoroughly before buying and I love it. Each to their own!
Discourse tells me this is an old topic. I just wanted to share and express my happiness, sorry Discourse for what I imagine is an automated reply (!)
Acshually, they have an open bootloader, and Sony has a programme for installing AOSP on that phone. You lose some feautures (because some keys get deleted while flashing another OS) like the cameras having lower quality, but other than that you can flash whatever you want on it. For this reason a lot of OSes have support for these phones.
Thanks for the info. Bookmarked for future reference
I used to love Xperia phones. I’d an Xperia SP and then an Xperia X. Absolutely beautiful. Now the new screen format I don’t like much. Is like sticking a TV remote in your pocket. That being said the product are generally really good and the open software program is incredible (as a lot of dev that works on it)
It seems to be mainly the screen format that people don’t like. Personally I’m fine with it. The other issues that get mentioned are the camera and battery life but they both seem perfectly acceptable to me. In fact the camera is very “realistic”, not over processed like some smartphone cameras. I think the main downside on the phone is the 60Hz refresh rate of the screen, but I think the newer versions of this model have improved that, I’m not sure though! The “side sense” and fingerprint sensor are a bit random though, although I don’t use them really.
I’m just glad I have an Android phone I’m happy enough with, because it meant I wasn’t tempted into buying an iPhone. That seemed rather pointless when my digital lifestyle is based around Linux computing.