pixel 5
Um, that's a Google phone. If your objective is de-googling, does de-googling work on your pixel 5?
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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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.
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
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...
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.
Back in the day we used to argue that the dream phone was Samsung hardware running AOSP, as with the S4 Google Play Edition.
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.
I used to have a Pentax that would fit in an Altoids tin. Absolutely inferior to anything I have now, but I kinda miss it now.
My brother in christ, if you cannot control the software, then you never truly had the hardware in the first place.
A better link for Jolla is probably their store: https://commerce.jolla.com/
I have pre-ordered the Jolla Phone and am hoping everything is working out (won't see it for another 4 months at the very least I suppose). I am very excited getting to know a completely new mobile OS to me and the actual successor of Nokia's Meego. Like with any alternative system, and to some extend also with degoogled Androids it is advisable to inform oneself first before jumping ship.
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.
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!).
Funnily enough, I've thought of the cloud as "someone else's computer" from the beginning and shun using it more than everyone else I know, but I was just getting into the space when Gmail and Chrome were the hot new things, each gradual step into the ecosystem didn't feel like a big concession, and I was too young to know to question the convenience.
In case it wasn't clear, reversing those two decades of inertia and tech debt is what I was referring to as the time-consuming bit. So far, what I've finished switching over is actually quite nice to use.
And yes, I dread the day even the fallback options start getting killed off. It's always one bad law away.
Kind of similar. Yeah, replacing everything took me a long time too and a lot of research. And I was one of the first gmail users, had dropbox account when no one knew what it was, etc etc, so I was pretty stuck. I was all google when I believed their "do not be evil" lies.
But I started the move very early too, after Snowden leaked the PRISM crimes. Back then I thought everyone would do the same and try to rely less on the cloud or, at least, stop using american companies. And oh boy, was I wrong...
If I had waited I imagine it would be a lot more difficult. I always kept my mp3, movies, porn, etc offline, but it was still easy to rely on gmail, youtube, google maps etc.
Anyway, good on you. You will find it surprising that you ever thought it was difficult after you've been detoxed for a while and end up being exposed to google products again. It will make you wonder how anyone actually put up with it.
It was so miserable I just gave up and bought a Fairphone. Much happier.
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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.
None of the safe phones are selled in my country 🥲
This right here is how i knew about my nothing phone to be relockable, good stuff
Dumbphones are just better IMO
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 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.
I hope mine lasts me at least another 7 years before I have to buy a new phone, but yeah, this will be my last Samsung phone. Hopefully, by the time I have to switch to something new, there will have been enough changes made that I can get a non-american phone and still be able to use important apps without having to use Google play. Cautiously optimistic.
Unlocking instantly and permanently breaks Knox too which destroys any chance of resale without being shady or flat out lying about it. I learned that the hard way, thankfully, with a cheapo A50 I was using as a secondary device back in heavy Pokemon Go days. That was my first Samsung since my Nexus, and my last, ever.
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.
You don't sign in to your phone, like straight lineage with no microg?
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Do you use this yourself? I wonder how much stuff breaks if you use it.
Also YouTube URLs are conspicuously missing...
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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.
That's good to know. Although that's a more difficult, if not impossible, mistake to make. If you search on installing something different on those phones, as most people will do, they will find that it's impossible before they even start the journey. Buying a phone to degoogle without researching if it's even possible is a bad mistake.
But the older ones it's worse, because not only every research will show it's possible, most reviews I found of the S10 with Lineage were actually very positive, saying everything worked great. Because VoLTE being mandatory is something new, and many countries will still work but not for long.
So it's really bad because if you don't pay attention to the IMS thing you will have no reason to think it won't work. It is possible, it works great, it just doesn't make calls. Silly detail that isn't mentioned well enough.
Sorry man, I feel for you.
And honour to them for sharing the knowledge here others won't fall for this shit.
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