Privacy

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Google Pixel alternatives? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 7 months ago by haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm thinking of getting a second phone to ease off iOS. It has been good for productivity stuff but the closed off nature of the device keeps disrupting my plans. Everything is either expensive or ad ridden. (Except floccus, floccus is awesome)

So far I have read about graphene OS and am quite interested. I really despise google though. Any chance to use another device and put some linux flavor on it? I was playing with the idea of a pinephone but it seems to be nowhere near daily drivable, fairphone is starting at 580 €, volla phone (german) 450 €...

Some people said xiaomi should be rootable. But the amount of different phones is huge. The price range is awesome though. I was thinking sub 300 €/$ would be awesome so tinkering doesnt hurt me financially.

Disclaimer: I dont want to go full hermit mode with no sim and a faraday bag. I respect the opinion but thats not what I'm trying to do. I want to write some small apps for my phone and use it as a computer if needed. Calling, matrix and browser should work flawlessly.

Any ideas or suggestions? :)

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[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Having run other rooms since about 2010, I have a lot of experience with this.

I've intentionally bought phones based on the ease of flashing.

I finally switched to Pixel this year because I'm tired of fighting. My last phone was a non-Pixel 2017 flagship, that was about as simple to flash as possible.

Only needed:

ADB on a pc
enable OEM Unlocking
boot to fastboot
fastboot flashing unlock
boot the phone to ADB/sideload mode
adb flash boot

The end.

Pixel works the same way. And, there'll be another Pixel model next year. So I should be able to buy a 2 year old Pixel whenever I want.

I've fought with flashing (and rooting) other phones, which require more effort, and it gets old.

Even with a Pixel I have a project plan with 130 tasks to restore a phone (many of those tasks occur in a single adb install script).

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wow! Thanks for elaborating. Thats quite a journey and a lot of work to get a phone restored but I really appreciate you telling me this. Obviously restoring a smartphone is at least as hard as a pc if you do it manually because the proprietary „comfortable“ mode isnt healthy for you.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Using some automation with backup utilities (O&O Backup) and sync tools (Synching,Resilio) make a world of difference. Of course, backup requires root.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Neat. I wrote my own backup script for my two jacked up servers. I suppose I would be able to either write something or just use these classics. Syncthing i think is deja dup, right? I use a combination of deka dup and timeshift for my pc and a script if I want to push backups over network.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm not familiar with deja/deka dup.

Syncthing is good for copying files around. For backup, a proper backup tool is required. I've used Titanium Backup for 14 years (eek!), recently switched to Swift Backup, and am now switching to O&O/NeoBackup.

There's also Seedvault, which I haven't tested yet.

With Android, I do local backups and let Syncthing transfer the backups to my server when I'm on WiFi and charging.