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).

  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    4·
    14 hours ago

    Two problems:

    1. Locked bootloaders: if you’re not given the option to unlock it, you can’t boot anything other than the stock ROM
    2. Proprietary drivers: even if you can boot a custom OS, many Android phones have very unique and obscure hardware and the drivers for them are only distributed through their stock ROM.

    The closest thing is LineageOS. If your phone doesn’t support it, there’s Generic System Images (GSI), but there’s no guarantee of getting cellular service after installing a GSI due to proprietary drivers.

    If you want something that just works, GrapheneOS is great, but you’ll need an unlocked Google Pixel.