From Google Pixel 4a to Pixel 8a

Well my Google Pixel 4a's battery has become so bad that 5 or so minutes of video recording is enough for it to shutdown, and much like my first gen Pixel years ago, it can no longer determine the true state of the battery. So I needed a replacement phone, and well...I wasn't going to go back to using my Pixel 3a, that's even older and out of support I think. Anyway, it happened to be my birthday and Black Friday was  upon us, so it was a good opportunity to upgrade. For me another Pixel device was the best choice, I have got used to all the Pixel-only features, the amount and quality of the updates and most importantly the lack of bloat! Stock Android is essential for me. The 8a was on sale at a decent price on Amazon and it arrived very quickly. Interestingly, purely by chance, it arrived at the same date that my 3a arrived five years ago, but then I got my Pixel 4a not long after that, so the 3a became the backup device. 

Unlike my 4a that Google sent me for free, which arrived in a fancy box with extra stuff, the 8a arrived in a very small box with no charger. I presume most phones do not come with chargers these days, but luckily I still have the original chargers from both my 3a and 4a. In the box there was a charging cable and the usual little metal SIM removal tool and little USB adaptor used for direct transfer between phones I think but I've never used them. I put the phones side by side and went through the setup process, including the settings transfer, wirelessly. One annoying thing is the process never syncs the state of my data settings, it always leaves 4G on. When left on it cost me 2 quid a day because I am on PAYG. After the initial transfer, I then updated the 8a to the latest version of Android, version 15 (my 4a is on Android 13).  

It is going to take awhile to get used to the fingerprint sensor being in the screen rather than on the back. In some ways it's more convenient, such as when it's flat on a table but it's not quite as reliable as the old rear mounted one. Combining with face unlock helps a little, when there's enough light for the camera to see at least.

One of the first things I noticed is they've nerfed the camera app, some of the advanced quality settings are missing and it seems the photos are not the highest the camera sensor can take, at least from what I understand. The Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have 50MP cameras, but the 8a shows "64MP effectively 16MP" on GSM Arena. Apparently you have to get the 8 and 8 Pro to get the much higher quality and more advanced settings. Bogus! The 8a has a fantastic camera sensor restricted down to a much lower quality. However, it does take better photos than the 12MP 4a at least so it's still an upgrade for me. And Night Sight is still brilliant too.

I've also discovered that from the Pixel 5 series, Google has stopped unlimited uploads of videos and photos to Google Photos, so photos taken with my Pixel 8a now take up space whereas those taken with my 4a or 3a don't. This is especially important with videos that can take up a lot of space. One workaround is to turn off uploads and copy the files to my older phones and let them upload the videos and photos, but that's a bit of a faff. Also, I wish they would not keep changing Google Photos, right now if you edit a photo in the phone app, you have to save it as a new file, which means taking up more space unless you delete the old one, so editing takes longer. In the Chrome app you can just save it over the original file, that's the default, as it should be. 

The front facing selfie camera is a huge upgrade from the Pixel 4A. At 12 megapixels it's the same number of megapixels as the rear camera on the 4a and I finally get to have slow motion on the selfie camera, which is nice. There's a couple of features on the camera I've not had on a phone before, a wide angle lens in addition to the main lens, and the long exposure feature in the camera app, which is good for creating light trails. 

Long Exposure

Night Sight and Long Exposure

Wide Angle

It's the first phone I've had that has no headphone jack but I've been using Bluetooth headphones for a long time with my phones, so I'm not too bothered, and I could use an adaptor if needed. The lack of headphone jack presumably helps give it IP67 dust/water resistance. Also The speakers on the 8a sound noticeably better, a little louder and fuller sounding I think.

Battery life has been great so far, lasting all day, when I've been out with just 50% battery I've still managed to get through the day without charging. I am determined to look after the battery better than than I did on the 4a, but whether it works in the long term we shall see. I intend to try not to use Quick Charging as much. As i was writing this review, the December feature drop came out, which should help me look after the battery, it added Battery Bypass, the ability to stop charging at 80%. I'm currently charging about once a day on my average usage. 

So in conclusion, I am pretty happy with my Pixel 8a, other than the dumbed down camera app quality settings, but then I am not sure what else I could have bought instead. There certainly wasn't the budget for the 8 Pro, and there's not many other decent competitors at this price range without bloat. Hopefully this 8a will last me another 5 years or so and I'll see what Google has to offer when this phone needs replacing. 

Installing a full Linux distro on my Acer Chromebook 14 CB-431

 So I was having trouble with my Chromebook. When editing photos with Google Photos it would slow down then freeze. After testing in another user account with no extensions or add-ons, it still had the same issue. I then went last resort and powerwashed it. This is simple and quick way of wiping back to factory settings....and then I decided to install a full Linux distro on it.... 

My Acer Chromebook 14 has been End of life for awhile now, (it was released in 2016) which means no more fixes for issues, and no new features. I'd already removed the hardware write protection screw inside the base in preparation for possibly putting Linux on it awhile ago, I had just put off doing it until now. Luckily there's very useful guides on the Arch Linux Wiki on how to put Linux on a Chromebook. I used the guide for my specific model, here.  It is a CB3-431, 4GB RAM, 1080P screen version (Acer also did a 2GB, 720p screen version). 

There's a couple of different options on the Arch Wiki, and I chose the Coreboot route. Linux only, no dual boot. After installing the custom bootloader, I went ahead with installing Linux as normal, wiping all the internal 32GB storage. I used my favourite distro, KDE Neon, which is basically Kubuntu LTS but with the latest version of KDE. I wrote the ISO to a USB stick using OpenSuse Image Writer, which worked perfectly, it's the first time I've ever used it. 

After a normal uneventful install, KDE Neon used just under half of the Acer's 32GB internal storage. It still boots pretty quickly. The main thing I noticed after logging in for the first time, was the display was on full brightness and of course in ChromeOS the Brightness keys are on what would be the normal F keys in Linux. You can use change shortcuts in KDE settings, and create custom ones. For Brightness Up and Down I used Ctrl + F6 and F7. For for the Volume keys I used Ctrl + Shift + F8 and F9  (which were the Volume keys in ChromeOS). The Fullscreen key is F4 so I added Ctrl and Shift for that too. There's a smaller number of F keys to standard so I had to choose another shortcut key for my favourite drop-down terminal emulator, Yakuake. As expected, the Google/Search key becomes the Super Key aka The "Windows key".  

Some of the fixes on the Arch wiki were not needed, such as those for the sound and touchpad. The trackpad seems to work fine, though right clicking only works with the default setting, clicking on the bottom right corner of the trackpad, instead of the two finger clicks that I am used to. Just a case of getting used to that, along with the new keyboard shortcuts. 

The sound works out the box and one advantage of running Linux on this Chromebook is you can increase the Volume beyond 100%, which you cannot do on ChromeOS, as the audio was far too quiet, in headphones or from the speakers on this machine. I used to have to use a Chrome extension called Volume Master to boost the volume on ChromeOS, but its downside was that YouTube couldn't run fullscreen while it was in use. Although having said that, sometimes after boosting the audio for some time, it sometimes goes to just playing a tone.  Another option I can now use is a USB audio interface, like my M-Audio M-Track Solo, which is something else I couldn't use with ChromeOS. 

After all the main tinkering, it was just a case of installing all my usual favourite apps, such as VLC, Audacious, Cantata, FIlezilla etc. And finally, bringing back the Leave option in the Desktop right click menu and removing the silly offline updates feature.  Performance is fairly snappy on first impression, considering it only has 4GB RAM. Lm-sensors reports the normal temperatures as 45 Deg C at idle, rising to just under 50 under heavier loads. Suspend and Resume work fine and battery life doesn't seem to be impacted. It does struggle with 1080P YouTube in Chrome, but it plays a little bit smoother in Firefox. I'm not using Latte Dock as I would usually, because that uses more resources than it should. KDE isn't as heavy as it used to be but I might have to install a distro with a lighter or minimal desktop environment.

 I've been impressed with the full 1080P screen on the Acer ever since I first got it, and KDE looks fantastic on it. I have always preferred to edit photos in Google Photos on the Chromebook instead of on the dull screen on my Thinkpad T430s, the colours are more accurate.  

So far, I am pleased with full Linux on my Acer 14, and I am not missing running ChromeOS yet. It can't run Android apps the same way as ChromeOS did, but that's something I rarely did. They often felt a bit awkward on the desktop. It boots pretty fast, getting to the logon screen not much slower than ChromeOS did. I only wish it had a backlit keyboard, but then at the price it was originally that was to be expected. Installing Linux has basically extended the life of this Chromebook and I'll keep using Linux on it until the device dies, which will probably be whenever the 32GB eMMC onboard storage is dies. It is soldered to the main board so it's not really upgradeable/replaceable. Until then, this Acer will get plenty of use, probably mostly YouTube and Google Photos when I am away from my main desktop. I just have to decide whether to stick with KDE Neon or switch to a lighter weight distro.  

Rant: Google Has Ruined Google Photos On The Desktop

 It's not often I complain about free services, but Google Photos used to be good, other than the occasional glitch it was very useful. That is until very recently when Google made the web app more like the mobile app, including making the image Aspect tool more like the Android app, which is mildly annoying to use with a mouse. And with every single image I have to choose the aspect ratio, otherwise it stays on Free! It used to stick to whichever aspect was used last. 

Oh and putting every quick edit tool behind a Google One paywall is annoying too, particularly when those same tools are available in the mobile app for nothing. The Enhance button usually makes photos far too cool by lowering the Warmth level for some silly reason.

But no, that is not the most egregious change. No, that prize goes to the removal of Copy and Paste between images. You used to be able to edit one image to how you wanted it, CTRL+C the changes, then move left or right, without clicking Done, to the next image and then CTRL+V those image settings. I could get through dozens of images in no time at all with this method, with maybe a slight alteration to the settings throughout. But no, now you cannot move to the next image without clicking Save. So that's one hurdle to productivity, and you cannot copy and paste, so that slows me down even more! Just why were these removed? Does Google even use their own software? This is just the worst change to Google Photos I have ever encountered! And they still have not fixed odl bugs like after archiving an image, the web app refuses to move to the direction of the next image, so i have to go back out to all images and in again. I shall now continue editing today's photos, which will take about 4 times longer than it did before!  

/Rant endeth. 

Update 14/10/2023:

Copy and paste of edits is back, but you still can't move form image to image without exiting edit mode.