**Wanted to update this post with a website I found that has info about this topic for regular people, in case anybody finds this later. ** Privacy Focused OS For Everyone It has info about the different os options as well as apps for phones using regular android.
Pretend I am five and please be nice.
Say I want to free my phone and tablet from samsung/google/skynet but I neeeeeed to be able to use my printer and external cd drives and their silly proprietary apps, as well as flash drives, cds, and normal apps without alternatives like bandcamp and libby and and all that. I also need to be able to use government websites and use my wifi and pay bills and just generally do everything that I do now on samsung’s/motorola’s software.
(Most of these things were issues for me when I tried to use linux years ago which is why I’m listing them. I do not possess the technical ability to solve these problems on my own when they come up. I also do not possess any other devices to use if my main ones can’t do these things anymore.)
Is this realistic in 2024 for Graphene or any other free open source os? And if it is, how do I install it safely and properly?
Are there any known issues with it like slowness or not being able to use the camera, etc? Most of the places with information about this stuff are not written in a langauge I speak.
Edit: does anyone want to work on creating or collecting some simplified tutorials with me? I’m thinking of installing one of these on my phone and it it goes well I will probably write the details down. It might be good to have a place for other people who have done so, or want to, to do the same for their respective devices.
Honestly, I’m with you - I’ve had people here even get indignant about how “easy it is” to install and use. Yet I have never seen someone here share clear, simple instructions. The official install instructions have phrases like “high quality standards compliant USB-C cable” or “Get a carrier agnostic device” or “4th and 5th generation Pixels only show the first 32 bits of the hash so you can’t use this approach.”
How do I know if my USB-C cable is compliant? How do I make sure my device is carrier agnostic? Hash? I know for most people here, these are trivial questions, but they are opaquely technical for 99% of the people out there. That’s fine, by the way - there is nothing wrong with a quality OS meeting the needs of a hobbyist community with the technical know-how to use it. Just don’t pretend that it is not a niche OS or that it is simple and user-friendly. I say this without any criticism, just as a basic reality check.
PS, in case it was not obvious, please do not answer the example questions. I know that they have answers and that many people here have that knowledge at hand. They are examples of just a few issues that require a base technical knowledge that not everyone possesses.
They say a carrier unlocked phone is recommended because carrier locked phones often disable the option to OEM unlock your phone in the Developer settings.
Well, you see, now we are having a conversation about the difference between “carrier unlocked” and “carrier agnostic,” which only seems to prove my point.
The graphene install docs is in your language and will walk you through the install process. Their support page points you to discord, telegram, matrix support channels as well.
https://grapheneos.org/install/
https://grapheneos.org/contact#community
As a general rule anyone that asks for a non-proprietary thing that will do everything their proprietary thing does without alternative solutions allowed is so far from the reality of non-proprietary software in a proprietary world that they can not be made happy so I’ll leave the support of that to others.
There is a lot of mixed information out there about whether or not non-proprietary things have ‘caught up’ in usability for the average person. Thanks for the feedback.
I have an unlocked galaxy s21 ultra and was considering giving it new life with a new OS but the amount of “don’t brick your Samsung” and “galaxy phones aren’t compatible with custom roms” put me off. Not sure what to do either
I have a moto g 5g 2023 which is apparently different than the moto 5g, and an A9+ tablet. I found a thread talking about the difference and some regional reasons why my phone and others like it don’t always have support. It looks like versions of these OSes often just don’t exist for a lot of devices, because fewer people use them. The lineage website did have a lot of samsung devices listed though and might have yours, so there definitely are some options. But it’s not every phone, which sucks, but i think the warnings about bricking are real and not just discouragement.
Honestly opening up software on consumer devices should be the law and mayyybe one day it will be in the us (eu allowed some semblance of alternative app stores recently and that’s something? ) but I think those of us with the less common and budget mobile devices might just have to wait for now. Or continue living inside the matrix, as someone else here said.
make sure to consider calyx too.
