As per title.
I am looking at a budget of up to USD$200.
Prefer to pay with sats.
Less is better.
Nothing flash just basic.
Preferably a cheap new Android phone rooted and installed with non spyware Linux OS.
All I want is phone to call and message and if possible basic browser capability so I can use Coinos LN payments and no google corp shitware.
Just Linux OS and ease of use.
Can it be done?
pull down to refresh
70 sats \ 2 replies \ @mister_monster 10 Feb
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/ this is a phone built for Linux. It's a project, if you're not ready for that then this is a bad idea.
You can get any number of refurbished google pixels on amazon or ebay and put grapheneOS on it. It's not Linux per se, it's android, and as you may know android uses a Linux kernel. It's pretty great. You can always get something other than a pixel, I have a preference for oneplus devices and you can find some for pretty cheap, I've seen oneplus 5s for less than a hundred dollars. They don't support graphene but they do usually support custom Roms just fine, and you can go with a hardened lineageOS build. Just check the lineageOS website for support for a model before you buy, and check XDA to see if someone maintains a hardened build. Chances are the answers to those questions will be yes and yes.
If you don't want to do that yourself, a friend of mine does this as a business and sells them here https://simplifiedprivacy.com/they-see-everything/index.html not quite $200 but you can get them cheaper through them than from google somehow, and he won't tell me how lol. They take sats.
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Solomonsatoshi OP 10 Feb
Thanks for your detailed response.
I have looked at the pinephones but not sure I could use easily as I'm not super tech savvy.
Just want something easy to use.
The product line your friend looks interesting and I may look into that further if nothing else viable under USD$200 comes up. Its good to hear someone is at least doing this as a business- there must be some real potential if they can produce a ready made product and easy to use free of all the shit/spy/ware attached to Google products.
The lineageOS also looks worth investigating if its not too hi-tech to install.
reply
28 sats \ 0 replies \ @mister_monster 10 Feb
It's definitely a little project, nowhere near as involved as Linux on a phone.
I've been doing it for 13 years. It's not that hard. The procedure is basically, you get a phone that can be unlocked and has lineageOS support, you flash a custom recovery, then from inside the recovery you flash the ROM, then do any additional stuff you want such as root etc. It's basically getting the right phone, familiarizing yourself with the process, downloading some files to your computer and copying some to your phone, then running a couple commands and clicking a couple buttons. I can't stress enough familiarizing yourself with the process though, with some phones doing the wrong thing at the wrong time can turn it from a quick procedure to a huge pain in the ass.
reply