Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

I'm astonished again. Linux isn't designed as GUI OS - where Windows has dynamic thread priorities for freshly woken up threads as to increase GUI snappiness.

Now, my CPU has four physical and eight logical cores for SMT. I'm running eight worker threads of some parallel testing stuff, and I'm glad that I chose the AMD 3400G over the 3200G. The CPU load is 100%. On top of that, MP3 audio, the browser, and I'm dd'ing an external USB3 HDD.

Holy shit, the browser is just as smooth as if the CPU were idle. No perceivable lag. I hadn't expected desktop Linux to be that great.

I'm also surprised that the CPU temperature doesn't exceed 44°C despite full load at 21°C ambient, and the cooling is inaudible. Sure, my cooler is massively over-dimensioned to achieve exactly that, but it's still amazing.

It's what I would have wanted ten years ago and only could approach somewhat, but now the tech is actually there.

Update on my 60% keyboard and (neo)vim journey:

I've been getting much more used to the motions and hand posture required to use vim, but I still don't understand people who use it as their main editor.

I'm still using vanilla nvim, because:
- I am afraid of learning to install plugins
- I want to master the baseline experience before adding more

I enjoy the snappiness, and I feel my keyboard skills further improving, but everything about neovim is disappointing me from the syntax highlighting to the clunky copy/paste to the difficulty of finding code you need.

In VSCode, I can just do ctrl + p to go to any file, f2 to symbol rename, ctrl + shift+ f to do a recursive directory search. These are things offered only by plugins in nvim, but are available out-of-the-box in vscode.

Even saving your file is clunky. I've gotten used to esc + :w, but it's just more keystrokes than ctrl + s.

Sure, my hand is RIGHT in the middle of the keyboard, and key for key, I'm probably writing code faster when I'm in a groove. But there are so many things that are easy in vscode that are difficult in vim that I know that I'm losing time anyways.

I'm an oddball. I use elementaryOS code. Mainly because I like its snappiness and simplicity. It has a bit of git integration, a bit of a file manager sidebar, and autosaving.