Samsung has great hardware, but their version of android is getting more and more bloated. And android itself is moving in a direction reminiscent of how I felt about Windows after win7.
Some 20 years ago I used Cyanogenmod on a Samsung phone, and that worked great, but it seems to no longer be active.
I see many alternatives, such as graphene, lineage, et.al… what are the pros and cons of each? For one I see that GrapheneOS only supports the pixel.
Note: I’m not 100% ready to deegoogle entirely, so if possible I would like to keep some features related to Google Play and its services.
I’d love an actual linux phone again; I bought a Neo FreeRunner early 2008, and while the tech wasn’t very mature at that point, it was my daily use phone for a while.
And no, I’m not buying a fucking iPhone. Made that mistake in 2009.
All those alternatives are Android, but mainly degoogled, lots are pretty good, I like CrDroid on my Poco F3, this is a very nice ROM, Graphene, Lineage, etc are all fine.
Main problem is mainly a lot of banking apps will not work, oh yes you can install Magisk, SuperSU, Zygist, SusFS, keybox, Mask Integrity, Autofix, TEE hacking, spoof a lot of things, etc and BANG! your bank app or Google Wallet will work and you can tap to pay with NFC! It will work 2 or 3 weeks until a google update/bank app update, and you re-spend countless hours on XDA or Telegram to find how to fix this. Until next time.
If you don’t tap-to-pay or your bank app does not mind running on an insecure OS, everything else is perfect in all those ROMs, pick one.
If you want a real alternative, you have the Apple world but you already made the mistake before 😜, or Ubuntu Touch maybe.