I'm hoping to install Niri on my main machine soon, so I decided to test it out on an old 2013 Macbook Air I had lying around. For a machine with only 4GB of RAM, it's amazing how snappy Niri is. Absolutely having a great experience with Niri and Dank Material Shell.
I've been a Pixel user since the OG Pixel XL and have owned six different Pixel phones. I really love Material and the Pixel user experience, I think they're easily the best Android phones on the market. That said - Google Messages has been borderline unusable for years. I move my entire text history over every time I upgrade phones in case I want to go back and find some old messages or media from a long time ago. And for the last three Pixels I've owned (6, 6a, 10) the Google Messages app has been ridiculously slow and sluggish in any environment. Sending messages takes undefined amounts of time (sometimes fast, sometimes 1min or more) even with full service, the initial app load time sometimes is up to 10 seconds or more, opening a text thread is extremely laggy, taking a photo or selecting a photo to send loads forever, search is completely inconsistent with speed and number of results... just overall a bad experience. I've tried all of the solutions I can think of - clearing cache and storage, deleting large attachments, unenrolling/enrolling in the beta program, etc. Nothing changes - it's just a terribly performant app.
I think my Pixel is superior to my friends' iPhones in every way... until I watch them open up their messaging app, have everything instantly load, and be able to immediately search across ten years worth of messages. It's just a shame that this seems to be something Google can't quite figure out. It's seriously the only thing I don't love about owning a Pixel.