That’s the whole point. Google assistant sucks because it only understands commands, and doesn’t understand natural language. This is Google’s attempt at making a truly great assistant, as they always envisioned it to be. Personally, I am very excited as there is a lot of potential in the technology. It would be a shame if they don’t execute well on it.

Finally. Thought I was going crazy about the YouTube playback getting stuck all the time!

This ended up becoming a big issue with my OP7Pro where it would very aggressively kill apps causing them to constantly need to reload which would cost a lot of battery. My Pixel 7 does none of that and Firefox works great.

My goodness

Look at Trilium if you want an open source and selfhosted alternative to Obsidian

Doze mode is still a vital part of the Android power saving featureset, yes.

Pay walled? There was a popup asking me to log in, but I just closed it and was still able to read the full article. My apologies if that was some kind of trial mode.

Interesting. Do you reboot your phone a lot?

You can still do this without root, but the app needs to target an older SDK version, meaning you can’t install it from Google Play. And even if you get the APK, Android will only let you install it through ADB. You can run an ADB shell on-device with Shizuku, so you don’t need a computer. Still annoying they made it so difficult though.

This point is frequently overlooked imo

It seems to me you are already looking into all the possible options besides getting a VPS with more RAM. I am a bit confused on why you are seeing increased CPU usage by the hypervisor for this though.

We’re going full circle

VM = x86 = android-x86 which OP already mentioned