Good luck bricking a Pixel while following Graphene's installer. If it protected the phone from me, someone who bricks basically everything they touch, it'll be fine for you.
Yeah it's because they ship the same OS image for everyone, be it US on a carrier plan or otherwise. Google services has complete control over your device (more than just locking it down), and that's what you should be upset about. For you that app is just harmless bloat, what's actually spooky is google play services as a system app. Do yourself a favor and install grapheneOS.
The fact apple wasn't considered a monopoly, and Google has is mind boggling.
You might enjoy more Fedora KDE or Linux Mint.
Iirc material files has it.
Oh, true, you don't get previews of the windows inside. However, that shouldn't be very hard to implement, so you might have luck if you ask for it to be in Plasma 6.
KDE plasma has it natively.
What you need to do is clean the dust off of your fans and ventilation filters (check guides or figure it as you go, but make sure to disconnect the battery and the fans from the mobo as soon as you open it). Then, repaste it with good thermal paste or some . I have liquid metal (thermal grizzly condoctonaut) on both of my laptops, and one of them which had overheated since day one, doesn't anymore.
I prefer the T480 series (imo Thinkpad went downhill from there onwards). The non-s is a great off-road laptop, but for what OP is asking, the T480s seems like a more sensible choice.
I have a second-hand Thinkpad T480s that I love, I bought it for 250$ on ebay and replaced its battery because it was fried (+40$). I use it for school and it works flawlessly, around 8h of battery life in a well-configured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. According to the specs sheet it shouldn't be, but for some reason it is noticeably lighter than a friend of mine's MacBook Air 2021.
What I really love about it is the ThinkDock Ultra (iirc 30$ on ebay), which lets me place the laptop on my table, and by just sliding a piece of plastic, it connects all of my peripherals in a second. I love this laptop so much that I'll use it until it dies so hard that it can't be fixed at all.
Like locking myself out of my system completely because of a typo in pam.conf?
Just sideload the ota, no need to go through so much trouble.
Gen Z, I mourned Reddit for 30 seconds. Now I'm here.
Can you try grapheneOS as a last resort? I get almost 2-day battery life on it in my 6a.
Família link (which does all that and more) won't work unless it has privileged access. Life360 is even worse than google, so no talking about that. I don't know what to say, if he's just into location stalking; then you can just use google maps to share the location, but elsewhere, you'll need to find some trustworthy MDM service.