Right… Those none of these are made anymore. Except some EXTREMELY overpriced “gaming” and/or Intel Atom devices straight from foxconn. Saw a listing for a Libretto 50ct with a broken backlight in Kyiv the other day, by the time I figured I actually want to commit to buying it the listing was gone. Reduced to atoms. Shouldn’t have been so indecisive… The seller also included a picture of it running Win95 with a VGA monitor, was funny to see a shortcut named “Kiev map” (old name) right next to an Internet Explorer icon shortcut that says “anime”.

Oh, I am not in Germany. Sorry for calling it that. I’m in Ukraine. Chose this instance in Germany for various reasons, including the fact that it allows IPv6-only networks (like when my ISP fucks up again, or I fuck up again, and IPv4 gets unroutable). I was also looking for an 8inch laptop but they don’t make Librettos or those “internet appliance” ARM ewaste pieces anymore.

I mean, your current phone is the best one possible right now as a phone… The alternative is killing the gap between “don’t bring anything” and “bring a laptop”.

Also, apps for Wi-Fi? What the hell… Can you not just look up a Wi-Fi map for whatever authoritarian regime you live in?

leave it at home when you are out of the house.

This would bring up the question: What do i need a phone for? for me it’s just a mobile computer for surfing to kill some time when i’m out somewhere having to wait

Same! That advice is for people using a phone for calls and SMS and such. I don’t. No SIM card. Airplane mode. It’s just a mobile computer. I can choose to bring and not bring it freely with zero consequences. I can scroll Lemmy from public Wi-Fi. Also, Gemini is designed to be “offline-able” just like the early web (scrape a bunch of logs and read them later) but the only implementation of that idea I could find is “offpunk” (I have a copy in Termux), BUT it is in Python, which means it brings in 2 gigs of dependencies with it… Maybe I will write my own solution one day. One day. Among other "my own solution"s that are piled up at the back of my head while I do nothing productive.

anonymously purchased SIM card

That thing has been killed here (germany) a while ago.

Sad.

And also Google for making an OS so bloated.

Oh yes, but not only google. Everything gets bloated as fuck AND devs become lazier and lazier. Done and gone are the days of optimizing software

Yeah! Although I would put that “gone” line a lot further back than most people. Some say C++ was a conspiracy, yet everything GUI nowadays is either C++ or faked C++ with C macros. That’s another thing in the back of my head that I would have “my own solution” for.

Wi-Fi MAC randomization

Maybe it helps: i dunno which android-version, they had a bug with OFF=ON and vice versa. So “random mac=fixed”. Made me so effing angry.

Yup. That’s the old behavior when broken AFAIK, the new behavior is that you literally no longer have a checkbox for MAC randomization per network. There’s still a checkbox for “randomize per connection” in developer settings in that case, and it does a grand total of nothing.

and since I don’t have Google services AND it’s in airplane mode constantly, it has no events to wake up for and literally doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi until I press a side button.

superfucking annoying.

Right. But in my case it (mostly) mitigates the lack of MAC randomization, so like, whatever. Also, battery lasts forever this way. If you want the “Googled” + cell towered behavior of constantly doing stuff, I think there are workarounds somewhere, same for the “Googled” behavior of having GPS ready at all times… Well, you would need root, and I won’t get into details this time but that breaks some of Graphene’s architectural assumptions. It will work but it requires fucking up some of the security down. Still much higher than Lineage for example.

So far I’m fine with graphene

Amazing for you! I am (mostly) fine with the Lineage (with the no-SIM part of course) despite being much less secure than Graphene. Graphene is like the “eat TailsOS MicroSD card to shit out weekly” of the phone world.

i kinda feel like a traitor with a pixel

Wait until you hear how many silicon fabs there are in the world, how many of them are doing microprocessors (not a lot), and how many aren’t owned by oligarchs (zero). Free software still leverages all of that. That’s why I am against bloat and webapps, software should run on as many existing chips as feasible.

Honestly, I would rather still have my 2gig RAM phone so that I can be in the minority to complain about stuff like the F-Droid v3 alpha being the only version that I have to wait around to load.

what’s your alternative?

I don’t bring a phone with me, usually. “Open phone” is an oxymoron, modem firmware is a black box. “Secure telephony” is an oxymoron, it’s unencrypted and SS7 access is being sold which lets people even impersonate phones on the network.

You could use some VoIP provider (jmp.chat?) or get a landline installed for times when you ABSOLUTELY NEED a phone number, like for a hospital that mandates it for a reason or another. You could also ask relatives if they have some keypad phone lying around (unless your country no longer has the infra for them, ahem, the US, ahem) or buy an MT62xxx (microcontroller levels of power) MAUI based nugget (my personal favorite is Sigma Mobile) for ~10 to 4 USD depending on where. In some locations, you can buy a phone with a prepaid plan that you can just not bring home afterwards (return / give away). For work, ask for a work phone/SIM or just get a pair that you only turn on at work. I will quote some more intelligent people here (CC-BY-NC-4.0, “anarsec”):

To prevent your movements from being tracked, treat the smartphone like a landline and leave it at home when you are out of the house. Even if you use an anonymously purchased SIM card, if it is linked to your identity in the future, the service provider can be retroactively queried for geolocation data. If you use the phone as we recommend (as a Wi-Fi only device that is kept in airplane mode at all times), it won’t connect to cell towers. It’s not sufficient to only leave the phone at home when you’re going to a meeting, demo or action because that will be an outlier from your normal pattern of behaviour and serve as an indication that criminal activity is taking place in that time window.

That advice is clearly for people protesting, but even if not, some govt official could think you were at some illegal event.

Personally, when I do bring a phone, it’s usually to feed the addiction :/ . I have a phone from like 2016 with LineageOS which I basically only use for 2FA when mandated (not often at all) and to scroll Lemmy from public Wi-Fi. Native(-ish) apps run really fast to me (my Lemmy client is Jerboa), but a modern browser is extremely slow and often crashes background stuff (and itself) due to RAM. Thanks, the W3C. And also Google for making an OS so bloated. I have a copy of Chawan in Termux for a special occasion. Apart from that, I may also (very rarely) bring a PostMarketOS phone (SXMO-de-sway/SWMO) just to write code or something else (although touch keyboards suck and I often find myself waiting until I am home and have a proper keyboard). Too bad the Nokia N900 is so rare and expensive… Anyways, if I really wanted to, I could buy a SIM card from a grocery store, shove it up one of the phones, then do my thing and throw it away before getting airplane mode again and arriving home. If I were to do that multiple times, it would absolutely blow privacy due to radio fingerprint and IMEI, though.

Annoyingly, my specific device port of LineageOS doesn’t have Wi-Fi MAC randomization support enabled at build time for whatever reason, and building Android is a complete pain requiring insane amounts of RAM and storage, managed to just barely advance in the build scripts to get it to compile a boot image with the kernel (itself needs much less resources lmao, it’s the fucking build script). Sooooooo there’s that. And even if I fixed it for everyone with a patch, LineageOS maintainers will just let it sit on the platform (that is ironically Google account only) forever and ever with a -1 score. BUT normally Android is set up to wake up the phone every .03 picoseconds and put itself back to sleep which is how it connects to Wi-Fi, and since I don’t have Google services AND it’s in airplane mode constantly, it has no events to wake up for and literally doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi until I press a side button. That with the hostname being set to a single space character, good enough.

Ubuntu touch is “open-washed” just like Android. I mean, technically you could do everything, like on Android. But you are basically limited to the one app store.

I know because a friend tried it. I recalled it having Snapcraft but I guess not, it came with “open store”. It is bloated as fuck. Well, at least it has some sort of server source, so “open” is technically correct, but nobody is using it because nobody cares about Ubuntu Touch seriously. No idea how it works but I am guessing it’s the same “install whole userspace with program” thing. Most of the “apps” are web wrappers and automated repackagings from elsewhere. A lot less actually touchscreen-only usable programs than like the Alpine repos, mostly full of stuff like “An appointment calendar, a clock, a terminal, a control panel, an MS-DOS executive AND, can you believe it, reversi!”.

There’s a “terminal” app but the root filesystem is read only by default, only slightly less useless than a terminal emulator on unrooted Android.

Haven’t read into Jolla and such but I am guessing it’s all the same shit. Corporate mobile OSes that just happen to be running unixy kernel/user spaces aren’t new at all. A keypad phone I have from 2009 lists “FreeBSD kernel” under “License and legal info”. Amazing! But useless.

Canta

Don’t bother, there’s still Unihertz’s spyware in there. LineageOS and derivatives are buildable as generic images that use the OEM drivers, reported working on that specific device. It’s a complete pain to build but some random people publish premade files, see here (get the first “Vanilla EXT4”) and here. More options there.

There’s a manual specifically for the Unihertz Jelly Star here. Although the download link there is outdated and the MicroG instructions are also outdated (follow the official ones instead).

If you don’t want to use the phone, may as well give it to a comrade locally that wants it.

in the US (…) we got rid of 2G

Sad. Although there should be modern bricks with 4G that aren’t too expensive, usually marketed as “for grandparents”.

There are other phone manufacturers than Nokia. Always have been. Shocking, I know.

EDIT: looked around and the ones with reasonable prices are usually the carrier contract ones from the carrier stores and carrier prepaid ones from literal grocery stores :/

FuriOS

Never heard of it.

To preface, most active rom development used to take place on forums, mainly XDA. Nowadays it’s on telegram, which is gated unfortunately

That user said “LineageOS”, not “black sky project andromeda void to infinitum nanogapps safetynet bypass v pizde optimized custom kernel gambling android read only memory: gold bar edition”.

bootloader lock sux

True.

50 USD

That’s 2 weeks worth of groceries (at least where I am from), what the hell man.

Linux phones

You are probably thinking of the devkits. The community has mostly moved on to getting existing devices to run their favorite distribution. Which is mostly for fun’s sake, since pretty much everyone has a desktop computer with the same (although IIRC someone installed PostmarketOS from a public use PC, that was nice). The community is tiny since it’s right in between “modern day smartphones are a necessity” and “Android isn’t open enough”, anywhere below and above (incl. spectrums) are unlikely to think of getting (and daily using) desktop Linux on a phone.

dumbphone

(??)

I keep stating this and I will state it again. An MT62xxx nugget costs ~10 USD new online OR ~4 USD old new stock at the closest to me bazaar. OR ask relatives if they have a keypad phone in a drawer somewhere, you will probably get it for FREE and it will have quite a lot more functionality and homebrew (not exactly a “dumbphone”, more like a “smartphone” but by 2000s definitions).

not everyone on here is super tech savy

Well, I personally wouldn’t consider it difficult. If you happen to get a phone that allows proper bootloader lock of course (bypassing gets more complicated, not end of the world most of the time). See here and there.

Ask friends. If you don’t have any, I can volunteer to remote into your computer and do the thing, actually.

bricked (…) Unihertz Jelly Star

Do you still have it? Should be relatively easy to unbrick that nugget.

Erm, I hope you didn’t know that someone literally just ran a few commands on an off the shelf phone and increased the price tag.

Well, someone did exactly that with Sonic Unleashed (XBox 360) IIRC. And a few select N64 titles.

The produced code is complete garbage, it’s basically the machine code disassembled, but instead of assembly it’s some technically valid C that can be forcefully shoved back up a compiler. Due to register sizes and calling conventions being different across architectures, there was zero chance of making the giant blob cooperate with native builds of the libraries it used, so some poor people had to pick out everything machine specific in the giant pile of shit that came out of the disassembler and fake it. That took forever.

The PS3 runs on an ancient fork of the FreeBSD kernel. We don’t even know which version. No compatibility even on syscall level.

Now, I remember that some random person added Nintendo Switch syscalls to Linux aarch64 then took GPU emulation from Yuzu. They stopped when it ran some Tetris. Now, that was relatively easy given the Switch doesn’t have too much of special hardware. Also, the CPU there only has the base instruction set + md5 extension, basically every aarch64 chip has that.

Now, the PS3 is full of random DSPs (basically coprocessors that are shit at everything except some specific tasks). And even if you get a PowerPC machine powerful enough (like some decommissioned server), it still probably won’t match all of the instructions. Catching SIGILL to emulate them… meh, you are basically writing an emulator. Which I bet would be slower than just emulating the whole thing at once.

I am sure I need the WWW network to use a search engine

Uh huh, yeah, I recognize some of these words

For some, functional calls are most important, for others completely cutting power to the modem is important. The cell network fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms, and people may just want a pocket computer (those aren’t made anymore and the easiest way is basically just reuse a smartphone).

Why is this marked NSFW? I was expecting to derail the train.

https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future <— talks about snaps for a bit too

Liechtenstein

Ironically I am happier with cock.li than proton

(context: owned by 4chan user (with a grain of salt(?)) but it’s best i’ve found :/ )