The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code is an exciting route to fault-tolerant quantum computing since Gaussian resources and GKP Pauli-eigenstate preparation are sufficient to achieve universal quantum computing. However, there is a disconnect between the noise model that GKP qubits are in theory designed to correct - uniform random displacement errors - and the conditions that affect GKP qubits in superconducting devices in practice: realistic noise channels, logical gates, and inefficient measurements. In this work we bridge this gap in three ways. First, we approximate the effect loss and dephasing on approximate GKP codestates using a random displacement channel, and show that this approximation matches well with numerics. Second, we analyze the error-spreading properties of GKP Clifford gates and describe how a modification in the decoder following the implementation of each gate can reduce the gate infidelity by multiple orders of magnitude. Finally, we consider the effect of homodyne measurement inefficiencies on logical state read-out and analyze a scheme to improve the measurement efficiency using the theory of quantum trajectories.