Sea of Tranquility

Another thing you might want to consider is the repairability. If you want to swap the battery years down the line, this can become a really important metric as well. iFixit is your friend here: you can just look up a device and check what the repairability score is.

is the GCam app noticeably better than a stock camera app? What sorts of things would it do better?

As I mentioned in my first comment: “Sometimes, the picture quality is decent, but often times it’s lacking” when it comes to the ROM camera app. How well a camera does, depends on the app (which is supplied by the ROM) and the driver (usually supplied by the manufacturer). The quality can, therefore, vary from device to device. A few years ago I would’ve definitely said that GCam is a step above ROM camera apps, but in more and more cases, those have become almost comparable in quality. One aspect where GCam still actually makes a difference is long exposure modes (low light and night photography) as well as offering special modes like panorama or photo-sphere.

The last I checked, the Pixels had excellent sensors but had some camera software issues that I believe were eventually resolved. I’m hoping that isn’t an issue if I’m just using a basic OS.

From my experience, older oneplus devices (e.g. oneplus 7/oneplus 7 pro) and pixel devices (pixel 5 and upwards) have excellent community support, so you should be golden.

For me, the key aspects for selecting the right hardware are the camera and the comunity support. All the other capabillities you listed are available on any phone that has a relatively recent ROM available.

Let’s start with the camera quality: If you want to use your phone without GSF or microG, you could use the camera app that comes with the ROM you flashed. Sometimes, the picture quallity is decent, but often times its lacking. Instead, I would recommend using a modded GCam App together with fake GSF. This way, you can use googles powerful camera app without sacrificing your privacy. So when I’m looking for hardware, I always check, if there is a modded GCam version available.

Aside from that, I would check if there are recent stable versions of the ROM I want, available for the hardware. The last thing I would check is, how active and how big the modding community for that device is. If you can’t find a lot of support on XDA, it’s probably not the best hardware choice to begin with.

When it comes to software, there are a lot of privacy-friendly replacements to choose from, but here is my setup:

• Syncing Contacts and Todos: selfhosted baikal + DavX5 + Simple Contacts + Tasks
• Syncing Photos: selfhosted NextCloud AIO + nextcloud app
• Syncing Notes: selfhosted webdav + Joplin
• Find My Phone functionality: FindMyDevice
• Maps: OrganicMaps
• Speach to text: FUTO Voice
• Synced Music: Selfhosted JellyFin + FinAmp
• browser bookmark sync: selfhosted webdav + floccus

EDIT: GCam and FUTO are not Open Source, but they are free and don’t collect or require any user data

As a lemmy client, I would add Eternity (APGL-3.0).

For latex documents I would highly recommend Overleaf (APGL-3.0). You can selfhost it on an old PC or raspberry pi and have crossplatform access on all your devices

A better alternative to F-Droid would be Neo Store (GPL-3.0) which has a more modern design and is less broken in general.

For apps that are only available as github releases (e.g. hypeBard) I would recommend obtainium (GPL-3.0) which automates the update process.

My personal preference for calculator apps is NCalcLibre (GPL-3.0) which has a slightly different set of features than your suggestion but has a more structured UI imo.

Text Tools Pro (Apache-2.0) is another awesome tool that can improve your typing experience dramatically.

If you have a degoogled device you might want to install FMD (GPL-3.0) in case you lose it.

For rooted devices, I would also add BCR (GPL-3.0) + BCR-GUI (GPL-3.0) to keep a record of important calls.

Another app that is especially useful on rooted devices is AdAway (GPL-3.0) which is a system-wide ad blocker that doesn’t require any resources.