I get more irritated by how crazy expensive they are. I bought a year old refurbished Thinkpad, and upgraded to a 1tb nvme, added a second 256gb nvme AND added another 32gb of RAM. . . And it was still cheaper than an iPhone. . . And I’ll use this computer for a decade i hope.
CalyxOS is meant to be run with a locked bootloader after installation, which makes sure that the OS cannot be tampered without your knowledge. Additionally, this has to be implemented properly to not boot any other OS once a CalyxOS build signed with our own private keys is installed - whether it be another set of private keys, or the publicly available AOSP test keys.
https://calyxos.org/about/faq/device-support/#requirements-for-supporting-a-new-device
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I’ve been looking - I got a cheap one on ebay last week but was DOA. I want something absurdly cheap before I go all in and buy a more expensive newer one. As much as I hate saying this - I need to make sure I can still do my job with it.
I’m lamenting this problem for a while now. I ran Lineage when it was still around, and I was very happy with it, the 1-click-installer worked perfectly. But nowadays I am at an age where I do not want to tinker with my mobile phone for hours, risking bricking the hardware. I am amazed that no store offers preinstalled Cyanogen, I would buy that without a second thought.
I am currently running a Fairphone 3 with preinstalled /e/ (thank god for /e/ preinstalled).
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Anyone using the pinphone64, wondering how is the battery now? how about the camera?
If battery, camera, sms, and phone work I would be all in to buy that phone. But most review say its really not ready for everyday use. Though it is really neat that you can use the terminal and communicate directly to your phone’s operating system, which can’t be done with the other phones.
There is also the Volla phone, https://volla.online/en/index.html
not sure whether it is worth, kind of a de-googled android.
Youre better off with a pixel or one of the motorola or oneplus devices that can be unlocked and flashed.
If you want the best possible degoogled option its one of the pixels with grapheneOS or next best pixel/moto/O+ with lineage+microg
Linux phones at the moment are just bad and more fun projects than actually usable devices.
I backed the bq aquaris tablet with ubuntu touch when it came out but it was not much usable. That was a couple of years ago. I am curious though how far ubuntu touch and phosh got nowadays.
I think it would be fun to test a pinephone with the right expectation and contribute to code (but sadly I am not a coder). Seems quite cheap for 150-200 bucks.
Thanks for the link, need to check lineage and graphenOS, I heard about the former but not the latter.
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Almost a month on CalyxOS and pretty much everything seems to work quite well. I’m very happy with it.
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Thinking about getting a pixel and try calyx or graphene. Did you get a pixel?
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Sure did. Pixel 4XL. It’s nowhere near the quality of my OnePlus 6t or 7 plus, but it’s really the only phone it works on.
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I am considering pixel 5a
The a models felt even cheaper to me. I’m used to OnePlus quality, so I couldn’t.
I only buy used phones too, new is too expensive. I got this off eBay for $250 in mint shape albeit used.
Make sure you get a REAL Google pixel. All of the company phones from Verizon/Tmo etc are boot loader locked and will not work.
You’ll know immediately if you put it in developer mode, if OEM unlock is grey - it won’t work.
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This is all promising. I have a Pixel 4a 5G, waiting for it to stop getting updates, then I will switch to Linux, and finally be done with my last tie to Google.
I bought a Pixel 5 & tried GrapheneOS & CalyxOS. Both are excellent and depend on your use case. Graphene is a bit more secure with speedier updates. Calyx uses microG as a drop in replacement, while Graphene doesn’t ship anything, but does support the installation of Gapps as unprivileged user apps.
The only apps you’ll not get to work are those that require Google SafetyNet. Typically, these are banking apps, although my banks don’t seem to use it. Also, Pokemon Go, which is kind of annoying, but an excuse to break the habit.
Otherwise, I’ve not really had any issues so far, and have been pleasantly surprised with how good the open source app ecosystem has become.
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an in-depth analysis of the data sent by six variants of
the Android OS, namely those developed by Samsung, Xiaomi,
Huawei, Realme, LineageOS and /e/OS
Worth noting that that LineageOS under study here had openGapps installed. That would perhaps account for the data being sent to Google.
Hardware and Software Used
Mobile handsets:
(i) Samsung Galaxy S9 (model SM-
G960F)/Android 10 (build QP1A.190711.020, One UI v2.0),
(ii) Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 (model M2003J15SG)/Android 10
(build QP1A.190711.020, MIUI Global 12.0.7 QJOMIXM),
(iii) Realme 6 Pro (model RMX2063)/Android 10 (build
RMX2063 11 A.38, realme UI v1.0)
(iv) Huawei P10 Lite
(model MAR-LX1B)/Android 915 (build 9.1.0.372, EMUI
9.1.0), (v) Google Pixel 2/Android 10 (LineageOS build 17.1-
20210316, opengapps 10.0-nano-20210314)
(vi) Google Pixel
2/Android 10 (eos build e-0.11-q-20200917).
Rooted using
Magisk v20.4 and Magisk Manager v7.5.1.
WiFi access point: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.2/Rasp-
bian GNU Linux 11/Mitmproxy 6.0.2 with iptables firewall
configured to redirect HTTP/S traffic to port 8080 (on which
mitmproxy listens) and also to block UDP traffic on HTTPS
port 443 (so as to force any Google QUIC traffic to fall back
to using TCP since we have no tools for decrypting QUIC).
Curious, google is collecting less data than other manufactures xDD
Yeah, manufacturers want their own piece of the 
In summary, we find that /e/OS collects essentially no data
and in that sense is by far the most private of the Android
OS variants studied. On all of the other handsets the Google
Play Services and Google Play store system apps send a
considerable volume of data to Google, the content of which
is unclear, not publicly documented and Google confirm there
is no opt out from this data collection. LineageOS collects no
data beyond this data collected by Google and so is perhaps the
next most private choice after /e/OS. We observe the Realme
handset collecting device data, including details of installed
apps, but nothing more. The Samsung, Xiaomi and Huawei
handsets collect details of user interactions with the handset,
in addition to device/app data. Of these, Xiaomi collects the
most extensive data on user interactions, including the timing
and duration of every app window viewed by a user. On the
Huawei handset it is the Microsoft Swiftkey keyboard that
collects details of user handset interactions with apps, Huawei
themselves are only observed to collect device/app data. We
observe Samsung collecting data on user interaction with their
own system apps, but not more generally.
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Any numbers on Calyx?
I hate /e/OS because it’s literally LineageOS without gms. I remember there was an article that bashes Lineage even tho it’s really private OOTB.