GrapheneOS does allow you to turn it off. It has a permission switch for your phone sensors. I don’t know if there are other versions of android that allow the same.

It’s a letter called a thorn. Its from old English, and was used for the ‘th’ sound. Its been largely removed from the languages that used to use it. I dunno why they have decided to try to bring it back, but that’s what the letter is.

There are a ton of distros that work well for gaming. I am currently running CachyOS. It was easy to get set up, runs smoothly, and I’ve been happy with it so far.

https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/gaming/