the-syreth-clan The concept of having to "remove bloatware" is still alien and unacceptable to me, hence why I've hated Android for a long time now, when I got into it Google Search and YouTube were preloaded, thats it but they kept adding to it constantly including restrictions. Windows until 10 didn't have bloat, Linux doesn't, OS X didn't, phones didn't until ~ Android 5, yes including even older carrier locked phones I have don't have any real bloatware just some basic branding and such, the extreme carrier bloat is probably a USonly thing, I guess let me know if they used to have that on WP/BB/iOS/dumb phones because even the US carrier bloat is an Android exclusive issue as far as I'm aware which just further proves that Android what enabled the normalization of extreme bloatware and now its spread to everything.
My current Android 9 phone is the only tech I ever bought that had bloatware and its still the least bad supposedly out of modern devices, "stock Android" but all Google is bloatware to me so yeah. Chinese phones have irremovable ads everywhere and Samsung has on top of their own, Google, also Facebook, Microsoft, TikTok, Spotify, Netflix, and a whole load of other trash preloaded, and people still for some reason consider Samsung the Android brand when they have the absolute worst Android experience.
Androidâ„¢, freedom for everyone to exploit and oppress the user.
I remember when mainstream reviews used to trash otherwise good computers due the preloaded bloat alone even tho literally everyone can and did reinstall Windows first chance they got anyways. Windows 10 is what broke me, seeing people go out of their way to suddenly defend forced updates, spyware, bloatware, around that time while literally a month before they were still bitching about Windows 8 and how its gonna turn PCs into locked down iPads, W10 and 11 did end up doing that and they were the same ones who proceeded to defend it going on exactly for a decade now, a was the tipping point where I notice just everyone drop all standards out of the sudden, I'm still not really sure what changed people, yeah slow erosion of rights over time but thats when it really became noticeable to me at least, overnight people here in mass went from trashing the concept of social media to getting addicted to facebook around this time for example, tech media and online spaces quit critiquing PC bloatware, forced online DRM and all the other shit W10 normalized.
the-syreth-clan I would love to be passed down the family's various old devices that are still working without a hitch, but they're all Samsungs and the first and only time I had one of them temporarily, it was practically unusable. A shame.
If it has pre-2016 software version it should be fine, Samsungs of that age can also usually install custom ROMs unlike all the new ones.
I'd probably get like a Lumia 950 as my next phone. At most something unique like a RED Hydrogen One, they were going for surprisingly cheap a while back on ebay and thats still Android 8 which is too new for my liking but also at least will run a few nice to haves still for years to come like the Steam Authenticator.
Nah Android is as "open" as Chromium is, if Google does something, it will happen no matter what, thats not open source and I don't care what their fake useless license says, at most its source available, it really shows how much things have degraded that people pretend that Android is open, I despise what Android became so much, I barely even touch my phone for these past few years im so disgusted by it, I only see limitations everywhere, early iOS jailbreakers had 100x as much freedom as modern Android does and I mean thats what it comes down to in the end, in general way past technology too, people used to actually value and demand openness/freedom/individuality and those times now are long gone.
Idk about mobile linux, looks jank af from what I've seen, sailfishOS is the one that looks cool to me, has some good apps for it, has a great UI, not fully open source from what I know and not even free but its a cool project imo, I'd also be willing to use that if there was any good hardware to run it on.