Ive been using GOS with pixel 8a for a month or so. Coming from 12 mini. The biggest differences i notice is battery. I had to charge twice a day in the morning and evening with 12 mini. With P8a, once before i sleep and it still has around 60% average. 40% if i really use it and 80% if it's a busy day.

Cant help about swipe keyboard. I personnaly use floris KB. Just normal touch typing. No autocorrect and suggestion. So far, no problem with responsiveness. 120hz is an eye opening.

I got the 128GB version. As of this moment, im using 15% with 109GB left. I got 25 third party apps. But most of them is Fossify apps. Im not much of an apps guy. I only install what i need.

Safe to say, ill probably gonna stay with GOS for good. All my apps are from fdroid, except a couple of apps like signal. I have private space set up for my banking app since it needs sandboxed play store. I have aurora store in there too. Owner profile is strictly FOSS apps.

i actually tried GOS awhile ago but i cant do it since tried to do it in one go. Big mistakes in my part. End of last year, i bought a server for nextcloud. I moved my files, photos, contact etc into nextcloud plus setting up a reverse proxy for it. Had to migrate my email to custom domain. I did it bit by bit until im no longer tied to icloud. Best decision so far.