No, sorry. Airplane mode should stop all data exchange with mobile radio, but you should still be able to enable wifi and bluetooth while airplane mode is on.

I’m pretty sure all communication with carrier is disabled when airplane mode is on, which should save more power than disabling only mobile data transfer (in this case calls and messages still get transfered and connection with carrier is active).

Unless you completely power off the radio you will still receive calls and messages. Some custom roms come with this option, but I don’t know if it’s possible to automate.

If you want to save more power, then enabling airplane mode and then turning wifi and / or bluetooth (depending on your needs) back on should save more power.

Essential? no.

Worth it? maybe.

Nice to have control of your own device? absolutely.

I have two devices, primary with root (through Magisk as KernelSU still has some issues for me) and secondary without root. Anytime I have to do something more demanding on the unrooted device I really wish I had root. Local terminal access, ability to disable some annoying “features” (verified app links) and multiple other things I use daily make it worth it for me.

EDIT: I saw mentions of custom roms in other comments. I have a custom rom installed (AOSP based). If I was on a stock rom (or god forbid something like MIUI) root would be a must for me.

Syncthing plays nicely with obsidian if you ever have to synchronise the vault between multiple devices.

Not so much about testing, but one time I really needed to get to my backups I lost password to the repository (I’m using restic). Luckily a copy of it was stored in bitwarden, but until I remembered it, were perhaps one of the worst moments.

Needless to say, please test backups and store secrets in more then one place.

It’s the first time I hear about resticprofile and it looks nice. So far I’ve been using crestic for configuration files. Do you know how they compare?

I daily drive a custom ROM with (sandboxed) gapps (currently crdroid, but also spark os, cherish os, voltage and others). I also have a tablet (old galaxy tab A) running lineage without gapps, which I use for reading ebooks.

I can’t imagine returning to stock roms. The inconsistencies, various hacks, apps not respecting your settings and privacy invading software. What a nightmare!

I think getting it submitted to fdroid would be a lengthy process. As an alternative IzzyOnDroid repository could be considered.

That’s one hell of a controversial opinion.

I personally prefer gestures. I find them quicker (you don’t have to move your fingers as much to do anything, especially back gesture) and more intuitive (like swiping on the navigation pill or whatever it’s called to quickly switch apps, much better than double clicking recents button). Gestures also integrate nicely with the rest of os (like swiping from backspace to erase whole words in gboard).

One thing I hate and I can’t understand how that’s not fixed in stock AOSP is opening left side menus (those hamburger ones) with gestures enabled. Half of the time instead of opening the menu it will just go back, even if sensitivity on left edge is set to minimum.

This is something that custom roms address nicely as most of the time setting sensitivity to minimum would actually disable gestures in this area (take note Google). If this is something that’s bugging anyone, you can disable gestures on left edge over adb (without root) with: adb shell settings put secure back_gesture_inset_scale_left 0 or with: su -c "settings put secure back_gesture_inset_scale_left 0" if you have root access (for more info look here).