[T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide] Blue6IX:
As well as it works, bear in mind this is just a slap-it-together fix.

None of the underlying frameworks that actually power the launcher are gone with the removal of rosie.apk, simply the launcher itself. (well, on the surface at least)

Yes, there is a slight performance gain, but nothing like what it would be if you actually went in and pulled everything behind the launcher that powers it.

Doing that, of course, would compromise the camera.apk, and most likely the whole rest of the phone in the process. It's likely that a new/different phone.apk would be needed, as well as most of the apps on the device.

(I don't know for sure yet whether phone.apk is tied to the sense frameworks, but I have barely begun looking into the .apk's we get with the phone, so don't take that out of context.)

Replacing the launcher, no problem. Ripping out Sense itself...we're quite a bit away from that at the moment. You can pull the launcher on the surface and still have a stable, running system.

I'd venture to guess, though I haven't checked for sure, any performance gains from removing the sense launcher are nullified by whatever launcher you replace it with.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't experiment, and I personally don't like the Sense launcher too much. I like some stuff about it, but what I don't like about it makes it worth it to me to trade it out for something else now.

At the moment i'm running the stock launcher again while I build my battery stats file up again, but as soon as that's done i'm back to ADW and ripping out the guts of this stock rom to figure out what needs what.

Now, the cool thing about removing the Sense launcher is there are a slew of widgets that won't run without it, so you can dump them as well since they don't do anything anymore.

Combining dropping the Sense launcher with all the widgets it doesn't need anymore, and the lists we are making in a few places in this forum about what you can/can't delete/freeze you can see a significant performance gain.

I just want to dispell the illusion that removing the Sense launcher removes Sense itself, they are two different things. As we decompile and sift through the software on the phone we'll figure out what we can and can't get away with.

Don't forget there are other things to get rid of to truly remove the Sense launcher, such as /system/framework/com.htc.rosie.jar (and corresponding .odex file) .

What I posted in the second post of this thread is enough to get it out of the way so you can use something else, but a far cry from removing it entirely. The deeper you dig, the less stable it all becomes. Until someone releases a rom that starts from the ground up, there's only so much we can get away with starting from the top down.

Meantime, though, everything we're doing here and talking about is helping the people who will develop a rom get an idea of how the system works. Threads like this and the questions being asked and answered are a big help.

And of course, this is all good fun too. Android is like legos, you can basically just build what you want with whatever pieces you want to use. Android is pretty robust and self-correcting, you have to do something drastic (like delete phone.apk) to break it.