For TVs the manufacturers are the ones who control the bloated adware and make money off of it while on notebooks and laptops it is Micro$oft. Except maybe for TVs coming with Android TV OS, but I think even that can be modified to promote their services.
I have a good experience with CalcYou.
Chrome or Chromium project?
The kernel is open-source AFAIK, but anything built on top of it is part of AOSP which is licensed under Apache 2 and allows for proprietary modifications to be redistributed. To be honest I don’t know how this licensing stuff works exactly.
There are no nearly custom ROMs for phones with mediatek processors AFAIK because the drivers are not open-source. Either that or there is a legal issue with modifying and redistributimg the modified drivers.
There are plenty of custom ROMs for phones where the chipset drivers are open (usually Qualcomm) and the phone has unlockable bootloader. If these 2 conditions are met in many cases the community is able to do better job of keeping the phone up to date with newer Android builds than the manufacturer itself. My phone would be stuck with Android 12 if I did rely on the manufacturer, but thanks to the community I run Android 14 with security patch from this February and Android 15 is also available. The problem is of course that most users aren’t going to flash their phone with a new ROM on their own anyway even if it is possible the ARM ecosystem unfortunately relies on the hardware manufacturer to keep the drivers and everything up to date (to work with the latest OS realease) and not on the OS distributor like most x86 ecosystem does, so you are lrobably right ARM is kind of cursed in this way. I know there are also drivers on x86, but the whole nature of things much more open. Correct me if I am wrong.
Honestly what you are describing here would bother me too. For example on my notebook I rely on configuring grub to use kernel argument amdgpu.abmlevel=0 which fixes the screen colors getting washed out when in battery saving mode, but I doubt I would be able to configure grub on an atomic distro.
to ensure she doesn’t break anything or end up where she shouldn’t…
So she uses an operating system that’s near to 2 decades old OS with years of live without any security patches whatsoever? I would say that’s rather more dangerous for her, than using an up to date operating system.
Just install an up to date os of your choice (be it Linux (Mint) or Windows) and create her an account without admin privileges and some reliable antivirus (especially on windows). If you want to be really safe you can filter her network traffic. There are countless tools for this. One of the easier ones to use is NextDNS even though it’s possible there are even better solutions.
Yeah, but that is not an op’s desired solution. I think he/she is aware of the navigation gestures option.
Because he hates his child and wants her/him to suffer, so he forces him to use windows vista. That’s an obvious answer
Sometimes just a simple phone restart can do a lot. You could also try changing the navigation mode to gestures and then back to buttons which should force update the navigation bar position.
I can approve you that the settings mentioned here doesn’t even exist in Pixel 4A. Only some ROMs add this option into their settings on their own, but it’s not a stock Android feature.
It is potentially unsecure both as a process and with its consequences, but if you know what you are doing (carefully read tutorials and guides step by step especially if you have no beforehand experience) you have a very low chance to brick your device or corrupt it in any other way.
It’s important to note that rooting is different from device model to device model and especially from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some manufacturers totally prevent rooting. Officially you lose the warranty of your device if you root it.
Some of the other commenters have mentioned that some apps check for root and refuse to work if the device is rooted (or only because the bootloader is unlocked) which is true, however if you are rooted there is variety of tools to prevent these apps from recognizing a rooted device (or just unlocked bootloader) so I wouldn’t count this as that much of a problem. I am using banking apps and google pay on my rooted phone just fine.
But it should still work in cases when you lost your phone and nobody else rebooted it, shut it down, or even wiped it, which is still a large portion of cases. I wouldn’t call it “completely useless” in that case.
German shepherd?
*Only for opening rar files. Not creating them.
You won’t get video recommendations on your home feed (and maybe also other parts of youtube) if you have watch history disabled in your google account settings (you request google not to save your watch history).
You may or may not agree. Here is their explanation: https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertising/
You mean the margins between the rounded buttons?