Btw, you can keep circle to search on and use GoodLock to remove the nav bar. You just press and hold in the middle where the nav bar would be to activate circle to search

I would generally agree with you, but in this case, Verizon has already been subject to such a rule for over a decade as a condition of the 700MHz spectrum. Verizon does offer subsidized/financed devices like the other carriers, it just doesn't SIM lock them beyond the initial period.

Given this data point, I think it's a good idea to expand to the other carriers.

I have a Galaxy S24 with the gesture bar hidden. It lets me do circle to search by holding down where the gesture bar would be.

I would love to put Linux on the computer side for daily use and then use the Android side for high resolution video streaming (Netflix, etc). Looks like a very unique device that will be great for those who can appreciate what it has to offer. Very cool!

Yup. It could also be hardware failure in the sense of a flakey power button. Either way, it's probably not people intentionally pushing the power button a lot

While not great as a general file manager, I use this app to launch into the hidden, built in file manager in Android. The major benefit is that it can access apps' data directories. Every other file manager is blocked from that (at least without root).

Oh, I had missed that. That's great!

I assume you mean S24 (because we already have Snapdragon S23 in the US). My concern, admittedly not something I've done a lot of research on, is that if Samsung was using Snapdragon for the CDMA or 2G/3G modem, that might no longer be a concern with the networks aggressively shutting down those older technologies. I'm not sure if that was the only thing holding Samsung back from Exynos SoC in the US, or if overall performance or other concerns were factors. However the prevalence of Exynos in the EU shows that Samsung considers it worthy of the Galaxy brand.

Hoping for snapdragon s24, at least in the US!

Who's your ISP? I'd suspect it's the ISP treating tethering traffic differently. I notice that on my phone (AT&T postpaid), my phone and tethered computer even get different IPv4 addresses. I'm not saying performance should be identical if they are sharing an IPv4 address, moreso just showing that ISPs can handle tethering traffic differently.

EDIT: just saw you're on Orange, oops! I don't know how they operate, they could be handling tethering traffic differently from native mobile.