Yes, yes it is.

I honestly haven’t noticed a difference.

I installed Graphene OS. Loving it so far.

I think LLM’s are incredibly useful in limited circumstances. But it needs to be on-demand, NOT omnipresent.

For example, I’m learning a bit of C#. I was following a tutorial a few weeks ago that had some code I didn’t understand. I spent an hour googling and reading documentation, but found nothing. I headed to ChatGPT and asked it what it meant. It gave a clear, easy to understand explanation.

Unfortunately, the industry is going about this all wrong. Google wants to force Gemini on my Pixel. So I nuked Android. Microsoft silently installed Copilot on my laptop without consent. That laptop is now happily running Linux.

Forcing these tools on people will just alienate people like me. In a way, I’m glad it happened. I’m much more satisfied now that these companies are minimized in my life.

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.

To me, this is its biggest flaw. You can’t scroll back in chats very far, but you can search for lines further back. However in a truly spectacular display of uselessness, the search only returns the chat bubble you searched for, with no surrounding context.

When I had it, my only symptoms were in my nose, too. Not nearly as bad as you, but I constantly felt like I had a bunch of water up my nose… The same feeling you get when you swim on your back underwater. It was a really weird sensation.