You could download an earlier version from before they were bought, it's what I'm doing. Still better than every other launcher I've tried. I'm also preventing it from accessing the internet via GrapheneOS settings, but I don't think every OS can do that.

I was running Charge Blade throughout the campaign of Sunbreak and I decided to pick up Insect Glaive once I hit MR6 last week. I love this damn weapon. You can play it on the ground or go into the air and target monster parts that are hard to reach otherwise.

Unfortunately there's a bit of a learning curve on which kinsect to use (I believe powder and assist are the preferred ones and dual color can speed up the harvesting process), where to aim for extracts on each monster and finding which combos/switch skills work best for you. Despite the initial complexity, it's my favorite weapon thus far (I've used every melee weapon other than switch axe but the bulk of my hunts are with hammer, dual blades and charge blade).

Yeah, I just installed the apk from an older release off apkmirror and installed Pro from the play store. I also disabled auto-update in the play store for both. You should look up if your OS can disable network connectivity on an app to app basis, the steps are different on each OS but it's usually buried somewhere in the settings. If your OS is unable to do so, I would use Netguard to prevent applications from using the internet.

Edit: Like someone already mentioned, the apk for each release is also available in the Nova launcher discord server.

Oh, thanks for letting me know. I'll downgrade again, I doubt there's much of a feature difference between those releases anyways.

FYI, you can download a version from before the acquisition. I'm running the 7.0.25 release and restricting network access on both the base app and the premium license. Not sure if it's foolproof, but hopefully I find a launcher that does app drawer tabs at least as well.

I'm still using Nova but I've downgraded to a version released before the acquisition and restricted network access. Still haven't found a launcher that does app drawer tabs as well as Nova has. That's pretty much the only feature holding me back from switching to another launcher.

My OS kept stalling/crashing on boot-up a few months into using it and I could not figure out why or how to fix it. Couldn't log in or input any commands into the terminal to try out anything so I just gave up.

Luckily my important data was backed up and I had Windows on another drive. I thought the drive might have failed, but it hasn't had any issues since on Windows. I'd love to return to Linux in the future but I think that experience wil haunt me for a while.