I’m having a good time even on an 11th gen mobile Intel processor with its iGPU. For more demanding games I use FSR to get much more bang for buck from the iGPU, on Linux it’s pretty easy to activate in almost any game. On a side note, Waydroid (with libhoudini) also has excellent performance on this setup.
The are ways to make almost all banking apps work on a rooted, even de-googled, phone. See here: https://lemmy.world/post/683341
Surely LineageOS and similar projects will continue to maintain their own, open source version of the dialer and whatever else gets dropped from AOSP.
LineageOS is great even without root, but I still recommend using Magisk on it for system-wide ad blocking (via e.g. AdAway) if nothing else.
A banking app may have a simple root check, or a SafetyNet check. You can use shamiko and safetynet-fix respectively to fool these, both have already been linked.
I love larger displays. Easy on the eyes, better gaming and video experience. Still, on many newer phones aspect ratio is a problem for me. If the phone’s screen is something like 21:9 then it’s only really big on paper, since videos won’t fit perfectly, and the text and UI elements of games I play would still be pretty small, since they scale with the screen’s height in landscape mode.
It’s mostly torrents that are dangerous without a VPN, since as a torrent user you’re also redistributing the content in question, and the peer-to-peer nature of them makes you very visible to copyright trolls.
Direct download is generally much safer. Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but in many countries merely downloading (or streaming) a pirated copy of a game or film is not a criminal offense, and is not in practice vulnerable to a civil lawsuit either.
Avoid torrents, know good direct download sites (these will vary by what content you’re interested in, look around using various search engines to get around DMCA delistings), use rudimentary privacy protections like private DNS and HTTPS-only mode in your browser, and you’ll get far without a VPN.
Tor is also a powerful, free option, but it’s generally overkill for non-torrent piracy and very hard to configure for torrents.
Are you hopping between DEs?