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This right here is how i knew about my nothing phone to be relockable, good stuff
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It really is time for serious linux phones
it's been the time for years, I highly doubt that it will ever happen. it's been a lot of friction to get desktop users to switch, it's gonna be 5x more difficult, considering mobile users are less tech-savvy and typically do things on their phone (rather than a computer which most people can get away with just a web browser).
Surely all or most of those linux PC users also have phones, and people already using linux should be easier to convert?
The thing that trips me up is that Android forks support most Android phones out of the box (with the obvious exception of GrapheneOS which is a deliberate choice), while Linux Phone OSs each have very short lists of supported models.
I have four different phone models available to me, from Pixel to Samsung to OnePlus. None are supported by any Linux Phone OS I've seen.
I think the fact that there's so few Linux desktop users that use Linux phones is a testament to how much friction there is.
most Linux OS don't support mainstream phones I think for a few reasons:
- these phones were built for the vendor's specific flavor of android, and thus already have the drivers for the proprietary hardware and everything.
- custom android ROMs are able to reuse proprietary firmware blobs from the manufacturer's software and it will work fine with Android. On Linux however, you can't just plug these blobs in, you'd have to rewrite everything to work with plain Linux.
Let's not forget the biggest issue, mandatory Apps that don't work.
I know of a few Banks that require you to use their app for online banking or as 2fa for online banking. Some of these don't even work while the bootloader is unlocked
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It was so miserable I just gave up and bought a Fairphone. Much happier.
How's the phone performing so far and what was your previous phone? I've got my eye on Fairphone whenever it's finally time to upgrade (hopefully not for another few years)
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Samsung has always been hostile af
An One UI 8.5 locks down the bootloader
I've always loved Notes and Ultra flagships, but I don't want to rep such a lousy OEM
They were always hostile, but it was possible. And once you finish the long and stressful fight with samsung for the control of your phone, you are left with a great phone in your hands. Depending who you ask, it was worthy.
But now they finally made it impossible. They always wanted to do this, and finally succeeded. They "won" the battle.
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And the new UI sucks hard. I hate it. But at least it's a work phone paid for by work and but my problem after hours...
Thanks for letting us know. I was thinking of getting a used Galaxy S9 or S10 for a degoogled Lineage OS phone. Now, it looks like the Pixels are the only modern phones that are compatible with this. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, I’d say.
Motorola is coming in soon, fortunately
fairphones also support it, and a few other relatively popular ROMs
I had a Note 3, Note 4, S9+, S21u, S24u, My wife/kids have Note 3, s9+, s23u, A series and a tab 4.
I've had Samsung 360 cameras, tv's, galaxy watches
It stops here.
The biggest thing i'm going to miss is a decent camera. I don't feel like carying around a 5x camera everywhere I go and most of the phones i'm looking at are kinda crap for cameras
Yup. I bought a camera after google play killing my s21 ultra.
Paid 800 dollars for the camera. It's inferior to the old s21 in almost every way, and I could get one for 300 dollars. Inferior as in a camera, not even considering how the s21 is great as a gaming phone, computer, etc. Plus the camera is fragile and bigger, so I never carry it, so it's never there when I need to capture something nice.
It's weird how hardware wise we reached such an amazing point, but the software has enshitified to levels I would never even imagine.
We have to choose between being a slave of samsung/google or let go of amazing hardware. But they can only afford to make such amazing stuff precisely because of their evil practices. So it will get worse. Hardware will become more amazing, the more evil these companies get.
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Yeah, technology enshittification as a whole has definitely picked up the last few years, and I find myself compromising more and more as the field of reasonable options gets narrower.
Like you, I used to only go for phones with SD card and headphone jack support. Now, I'm on a (new but not bought from Google) Pixel 9 Fold with GrapheneOS using a DAC adapter to still have wired audio and a more deliberate storage management system to compensate for not having SD cards. (Unlike you, I need a big screen for spreadsheets and such.)
I purposely bought the newest phone I could within my budget, because I'm planning for Android to be completely unviable the next time I need to upgrade, and I want to give Linux phones as much time to mature as possible before I inevitably migrate.
It seems offline tech is going to be the last bastion of safety sooner rather than later, so I'm in various stages of migrating my digital life offline. Linux over Windows. Keepass, LibreOffice, Obsidian, etc. + Syncthing over cloud options. Keeping off-site backups with friends and family instead of in the cloud. Keeping local DRM-free media. It's time-consuming but rewarding. I should have done it all way sooner.
I have been on the offline open source route for many years. I don't even see it as time consuming. It's so much better than relying on cloud services that it pays off. I lost count of the situations where needing cloud would have been bad. But maybe I trained myself that way, because I never liked the "cloud" idea, my data out of my control.
But the hardware to run that and the options to do that will become more and more impossible. At least on mobiles.
There will come a day when Syncthing won't work anymore on android, because of "security" (the terrorists could send files to your phone and kill children!).
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Who makes phe calls anyways nowadays?
But yes: The best phones for degoogling are the Google phones.
Technically, the brands that offer already degoogled android (fairphone) or Linux directly (jolla) are better.
Ethically, yes.
Technologically, no. By magnitudes.
For security and privacy (by extension), Graphene is king.
For freedom, Graphene has some lacking things.
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And how do you people talk to other people? Whatsapp? Apparently that's how it is in brazil, even to call companies or support.
About the second line, "best" is being generous. I guess you mean better supported. Although for some very odd reason the internet seems to love pixels. While they are the worse phones I've used for the price after apple phones (for similar reasons).
But above all, the fact that other phones support for open source is even worse than google is why I'm considering to learn to live without smartphones. If we have to rely on google for our freedom and privacy, we are well and truly fucked. And we deserve to be if that's the case.
Pixels are "loved" because they can run grapheneos and others. Not because they're technically superior phones.
They're the opposite of fucking samsung. In that one single regard though.
Attach phone, click install, wait, google gone. All others are getting harder and harder to even root.
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Instead of whatsapp, I use signal. I explained to my friends that I moved to it. Some installed the app for me. Others didn't. I accept that.
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New hosts/adblock/pihole/adguard filter/rule:
#GOOGLE===============================
0.0.0.0 google.com
0.0.0.0 googleusercontent.com
0.0.0.0 googleapis.com
0.0.0.0 gstatic.com
0.0.0.0 android.com
0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 googlehosted.com
0.0.0.0 googletagmanager.com
0.0.0.0 googleadservices.com
0.0.0.0 pki.goog
Phone now degoogled.
Do you use this yourself? I wonder how much stuff breaks if you use it.
Also YouTube URLs are conspicuously missing...
As someone that has a similar list but not exactly that... A lot. A lot of stuff breaks but! You don't see ads in shitty mobile games anymore.
Another thing you find is how many links go through a google analytics or seems to be sponsored
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You don't sign in to your phone, like straight lineage with no microg?
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I am seriously hoping to be able to ditch Android entirely for something like post-market OS, Linux, in the future. And we'll be taking a look at what phones are supported when buying my next one.
In addition to this, anything on One UI 8 and above does not allow the bootloader to be unlocked, regardless of region. Fortunately, I had already rooted my S23 and have stayed on One UI 7 ever since.
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I hope we'll have next-gen linuxphones before 2G gets fully phased out in the EU....
You are lucky. Here not even 3G or 4G works anymore. If it doesn't have VoLTE it doesn't work. It started this year.
I vowed my Last Samsung phone would be A55 (or A56 if you also count my house hold)
Good on you! Let's spread the word and help samsung die! (It won't make any difference, but I want to pretend it will)
Such a pity. I really enjoyed the first few galaxy notes I had back in the day. S pens were really useful for desktop mode on websites.
Of course this was once the fuckery stock os had been replaced with something better from XDA forums.
But Samsung was dead to me long ago.
These phones should have been a utility to begin with. Like the old land lines. Then there would have at least been a national set of standards developed for the gadget sellers to follow, instead of the wild west it's become.
@guismo Thanks for sharing. Mate: just get yourself a (used) Pixel that is still supported like 7a or preferrably New er like 9a or 10. Chuck GrapheneOS on it and call it a day. Good luck
I have a pixel5 with Crdroid on it (I had graphene on it but I really really didn't like it). Crdroid is awesome, makes this horrible phone much more tolerable.
All following pixels are even worse for me. Besides all the nonsense issues of pixel5 (no sd card, no headphone jack), they are all massive, while still being much worse then the competition. I really don't understand how anyone except apple users like it. It's almost as limited as an iphone.
Plus, I really don't want to rely on google hardware, or anything at all. If that's the best option, then even better is to learn to live without a smartphone.
I had a A53 5G which only supported outdated Android ROMs like TrebleDroid support.
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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