Re: Better?
Nah, a lot of the lockouts, restrictions, spying, etc... that I have been trying to rip out are in Android itself. While Android One may remove the annoying "undeletable" apps like FB, etc... I still have the Google spyware itself to deal with, not to mention its UI is not much better over the "customised" versions I've used.
The only phone UI I have recently used that seemed nicely designed is the Apple one (work gave me an iphone as a work phone). The phone is a pleasure to use, as long as you use it the way they want you to.
Otherwise it is too restrictive and controlling. It feels like I am being babysitted all the time. I can understand the appeal if people want a phone to "just work" and don't care about the cost or flexibility/freedom, but it is not for me.
Cyanogenmod used to be my "goto" OS for Android phones. Since the fork to LineageOS, I have not had the luck to get it working on any phone I buy. Even if I manage to unlock the phones bootloader, I find that versions of LineageOS available are not supported, or if they are, they are not "finished" and still experimental.
Rarely does a LineageOS port end up "finished" to the point where you can use all the phone features as intended, at least from what I see.
I am not sure if that is due to modern phones being much harder to port LineageOS to, or since the rename they have been short of manpower to port to them. It may be just that so many phones are released nowadays, so quickly, with so many varieties of HW, that its impossible to reverse engineer and polish up a third party image before the phone becomes "out of date", and something new comes along.
My plan for the moment, instead of lugging my laptop around, is to see if I can get one of those Gemini PDAs and load up a proper Linux on them. With tethering to a dumbphone that has 4G + bluetooth, I should be happy for my on the go computing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
