DeGoogle Yourself

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A community for those that would like to get away from Google.

Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!

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My Pixel 5a just died after 5 months of use. Looking for a new phone I can deGoogle. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by inasaba@lemmy.ml to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

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It seems that the motherboard is dead, and that it's a common issue with the 5a and I "should've known better," despite it being impossible to find decent information on phones these days.

I got it because it was the last Pixel with a headphone jack, and because it had good official LineageOS support. But I compromised: giving up the SD slot was tough for me, and now that I've been burned by not having one (I typically auto-backup my Signal history and other things to the SD card) I don't want to get another phone without it.

But the landscape seems bleak. The vast majority of phones that are officially supported by LineageOS are Pixels. It's impossible to find easy information on which phones have non-official LOS ROMs. Search results are useless these days, and I also keep running into an issue where after researching a phone for half an hour I discover that it has some arcane process to unlock the bootloader that doesn't always work, and the forum posters imply that the purchasers "should've known better." I'm just at my wit's end.

If anyone can suggest something that has decent deGoogled ROM support with the following features, I'd be very grateful:

OLED screen (a must-have for my photosensitivity)
SD card slot
I am willing to give up the headphone jack in order to expand my options

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[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

You’re not coming across as rude. A lot of what you just said was kinda implied by your tone and description of the situation.

Tbh it sounded a lot like me about twelve years ago when my phone died and I had to restore from an older backup. Given, the backup was only a week old but I was running hot back then and lost a lot of conversations and stuff. So it’s not out of a need to chastise you but instead from recognition that that kind of thing sucks and a desire to help.

what you’re talking about sounds very familiar. I rely on notifications for everyday stuff too and you might not but I get distracted easily and forget to do important things.

I moved out of cell service range about a decade ago. I was able to get by before there was internet at the house with a cloud based backup system and relying on always stopping for a long morning coffee at a place with free WiFi that was in cell service range. Five years ago they put a tower up so I don’t have to do that any more.

My recommendation to figure out how to get away from sd was not just because it’s an awful storage medium that fails silently and leaves you in the lurch, but also because it’s not ever gonna get easier to find phones with sd support. You said yourself it’s getting harder and harder every time this happens and you need to prioritize reliability.

If you’re willing to figure out a different way of handling your automatic backups I think you can get a reliable phone, it’s only gonna get harder, more expensive and more frustrating otherwise.

If you want, and when you have time, I can help you figure out how to get to a situation where you don’t have to do this every couple years.