Like I don’t have space in my life right now to do a whole lot of actual tinkering but google is pissing me off and I just remember in middle school just being able to change the boot order in the bios and plug in a usb stick and a few hours later having mint installed. What’s the easiest way to get a clean de-googled os on my phone?
Since it keeps coming up, I have a unihertz atom, a moto g 2022 and one of these monstrosities
Extra bonus question, if I do wind up buying a new phone in the future what brands should I look out for? (But I’d like to keep using what I have until the hardware breaks if possible).
The real answer is PostmarketOS. Look at all the phones supported. They add new phones every 2 weeks/month as more people volunteer to help get phones they own supported. The Fairphones are an amazing option with PostmarketOS. Can switch to different distros too (Not the same as it is for laptops yet for switching distros but the overall function works as daily driver. Just pick phones that have full support)
It depends on what phone you have. Some phones have bootloaders you can’t unlock, and you can’t do much at all with that. If you can unlock the bootloader, your options are determined by which third-party Android builds support your hardware.
LineageOS is a popular option with pretty broad device support; GrapheneOS is a privacy/security focused option that only runs on Pixels.
In my opinion, the worst Android flavor among the popular ones is the Samsung’s One UI. Notoriously bad in terms of tracking and telemetry. Yeah these Chinese ROMs are certainly bad, but where I am from, these are few and far between.
The worst thing about Samsung is the inability to install any Custom ROM despite it being a Snapdragon chip. Other manufactures like Xiaomi or OnePlus sometimes let’s users do that (albeit the process might be a little difficult).
But to answer your question, look into LineageOS’s supported device list. Pick a device from there and install LineageOS. Or better still by a Pixel (there are talks about a partnership with an unknown OEM and GOS, but no clear news on that as of yet) and install GrapheneOS.
lineage and its siblings like graphene. degoogled or with microg if you can. i think you can bypass some banks and stuff for detecting root, but it is annoying and impractical afaik. postmarket if you are feeling adventurous, it’s full gnu/linux and a beta quality experience so far.
that’s if your phone supports any of it at all. they don’t make it too easy for you to exercise your ownership over your own hardware these days, unlike the bios thing of yesteryear.
the amout of tinkering will depend on which device and whether or not you need some of the apps that block themselves out from running in a different rom.
honestly, you can start by replacing proprietary apps by foss ones.
If you list your phone model I can research your options for you. I know overall that Samsung phones are the worst offenders for restricting your options though, along with iPhones OFC.
A unihertz atom, a 2022 moto g, and one of these monstrosities.
Getting annoyed with the attention economy and swapping to this (I love it)
edit: it’s a uniherz jelly star green edition
😁
