operation-casserole
You know, unfortunately using gos/pixel and moving to a "privacy" phone has a very tall learning curve. It was quite unpleasant even for a technical person like me.
I'll just say its really important to have a "fully functional base" to start from so that the phone becomes usable. This means having a full set of working "primary" apps that don't pain you.
This means apps for:
- phone calls,
- SMS
- gallery
- camera
- calendar
- note taking
- calculator
- audio/video player
- file explorer
- youtube player
- maps
- browser
- weather
- app store
Sometime the look and feel of the OS is also critically important for the person so add "launcher" to the above list.
Once you have the above out of the way, the rest become much easier to deal with and you can take your time to deal with them since your base phone is working and not bothersome.
Replace any app that gets on your nerve. Don't neglect this.
As to your pain, you know, you just have to be clear about why you do this and what you are freeing yourself from. You have to be clear about the value of that for yourself. That the extreme surveillance built into regular phones is just not the future you want in your life and that the alternative has some pain and you are willing to endure that pain and cost. The cost gets lesser over time.
The reason this has dragged for you is cause you never committed. Though i'll say it took me a whole month of 8 hours a day to learn everything i needed, and that was really gruesome. Back then i thought "there is no way the average person could stomach this". So i totally get where you are coming from as well. I was there too.
But now i kind of don't even notice the phone anymore. Which is where you wanna be.