I went DivestOS, a fork of Lineage. I forget why, but I like it better.

Cool, didn’t know about Dino, thanks!

Rich?

So only the half of the US that buys iPhone’s is rich?

Or is it they don’t know what they’re paying because it’s part of the monthly bill?

Most of the iPhone users I know are in their 20’s and make less than half of what I do… And I’m far from rich.

I’ve bought used phones since 2013. The most I’ve ever paid is $150, and that was recently for a Pixel.

You can pickup a Pixel 4 for about $100.

Surely “most people” are paying far more for their phones.

Lineage and a fork, DivestOS are very close to Graphene, and run on far more devices.

The search for perfection is the enemy of good.

I’ve run Lineage for years on some spare devices. Battery life is so much better without Google Services.

My most recent device (Pixel 5 with DivestOS) is averaging 1.1% battery consumption per hour over the last day. That included an hour of navigation, using Google maps with microG services.

One old device runs longer with DivestOS than it ever did with stock, and the battery has lost 40% capacity. That’s how bad Google Services eat battery.

Plus Lineage permits you to use a number of old devices, unlike Graphene. It’s good, it gives you far more control than Google.

My final thought on Graphene - it needs to be taken over and lead by some professionals. Those folks act like stereotypical geeks of 30 years ago, arrogant, condescending (I worked with their type 30nyears ago, and was a little like them then). They also denigrate anything less than what they deem “perfect”. The very definition of hubris.

Their attitude is “if you have a problem you must’ve done something wrong, why did you do something wrong”. Having that experience with them has put me off Graphene permanently.

Edit: I can re-lock the bootloader with Divest, so the condescending Graphene folks are just plain wrong about being the only OS that can do this.

First, don’t buy new phones. You’re paying a massive premium to be first. Especially since you’re going to flash a rom, which has a little risk anyway (I’ve bricked phones by flashing, though not for years).

I just upgraded from a 2017 flagship to a Pixel 5 (only because my cell company decided to stop it working on their network, when I can throw a different Sim in and it works fine). I was able to buy 3 Pixel 5’s for less than you paid for your new phone. Which means I have a daily driver, a hot spare, and a test device for a little over $400.

If my daily breaks, I pickup my spare and swap the SIM, since I keep both phones synced with Syncthing. I don’t even have to login to anything because that’s all done. (I had 4 functional devices of my 2017 phone, they had become so cheap).

So pick a 1-2 year old model that you like the features, and pay far less for it.

Before (finally) coming to the pixel, I would look at the Lineage device list, then check those phones out at gsmarena.com and phonearena.com to see which I’d prefer, because Lineage has the broadest device support that I’ve seen.

Today I run DivestOS, a fork of Lineage with some changes to a few things. I forget now exactly what I preferred (I’d have to pull up my comparison spreadsheet), but average battery consumption is a staggering 0.5% per hour, with microg services installed and a couple apps using it. Consumption average increases to about 4% per hour when I’m doing a lot of intensive stuff - copying files over the network, using nav, watching a video, etc.

Research has shown that for the average person, vit D supplements are practically a waste as the forms they provide don’t match what we need.

You and I are special cases.

Sun is what the typical person needs, so their body can produce the forms of D they need.

Nah, they already have your email, and Play services could track that too. They just want to make sure they’re the only ones tracking your email.

Fear of change? Hahahahaha

No, I just know what’s involved, with the unpredictable “gotcha” a year from now.

Not to mention the knowns. Holy hell switching from Windows to Linux is very problematic for typical end users. Yes, the UI is that different, even with “friendly” distros.

You say your grandma made the switch? OK, so someone who uses a browser for everything and doesn’t actually use office.

Let’s see Libre office open an excel spreadsheet with tables.

Or edit a word doc and send it back and have it not be screwed up.

Not migrating is practicing risk mitigation. Hell, I can’t change a single setting on work systems without validating that change in the lab first. And you want people to switch entire operating systems. For what?

So stop this fear projection nonsense.

(And I work with Linux every day on multiple distros).

Did what go wrong?

Never used TikTok (which is what I assume “TT” means). Don’t have a YouTube account, use it very little anyway.

So what’s the question again?

My experience: most of my apps work fine without Google services. Even more advanced apps - sometimes they just can’t verify licensing, so may complain occasionally. Even now, Macrodroid can’t verify licensing through microG, but the dev has a process for licensing with a serial key based on your Google account.

Snikket seems to be it for iOS. But it does work pretty well, I haven’t run into any issues with it.

For Windows well, nothing does voice as far as I know.

The contacts were surprisingly robust. Mine just died, sadly.

New ones are crappy knockoffs, but they’re cheap enough.

Proton sucks.

I had an account, way too many problems. Apps sucked ass.

The fork is much better anyway.

It moves the sync options into each sync folder/job. Lots more flexible. Now my photos sync on any network and any charge state, while less important things (downloads, etc) only sync when on WiFi and charging.

Only updates it should need are for weird changes Google decides to make to Android.

Hell, at this point if someone forked the fork, and charged a small fee for the Relay Server hosting, I’d happily pay.

Thanks, it’s been a while.

The 90’s? Locked bootloaders would’ve meant people woukdve simply bought different machines without a locked bootloader.

See the IBM/Phoenix BIOS war - it’s essentially the same thing. IBM didn’t want to license their BIOS to everyone, so Phoenix reverse engineered it. If I remember right, IBM was trying to lock everyone to using their OS.

Early Android (circa 2009) didn’t have locked bootloaders.

Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them. Pixel’s today are unlocked when purchased from Google.

Even my earliest Verizon phones weren’t bootloader locked - they didn’t start doing that for a few years (my last Verizon phone in 2012 wasn’t bootloader locked). And Verizon is arguably the worst vendor when it comes to bootloader locked phones.

That just sounds painfully inefficient (though we’ve been doing stuff like this for decades).

Arm isn’t as efficient at higher cpu states as x86, and running a VM you’re definitely going to up the cpu usage.

Still interesting to watch. And every use-case is unique. For the typical short-run process this is for, it’ll probably be fine.