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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

That's why I only buy phones that are supported by LineageOS (usually second hand). Not ideal, but it's the best I've found so far.

I guess paying $150 for a fully up-to-date phone that was worth $700 just two years ago isn't such a bad deal.

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The last time I tried to install LineageOS on my phone I had to execute a non-reproducible binary of some anonymous haxxor to flash the OS. I remember I could have build my own image from source, but the only documentation was spread over a thread on a message board with a couple hundred pages... and if you screw your build you brick your device.

I remember that with a very very old HTC. The bloody thing only had 256mb of storage or something. Everyone around me was convinced it was better of in the trash.

Then i found some crazy Russian developer that managed to shrink Cyanogenmod 11 to something extremely small. It was functional once again, although very slow and a little useless because it can't work with the current size apps. I learned a lot that weekend, which is always one of the main goals.

Bricking it is near impossible once you get the Clockwork bootloader running.

You never have to do that if you choose your phones well.

How do you flash LineageOS onto a well chosen phone? Don't you need something like TWRP?

Yes, you usually flash TWRP, then Lineage.

And how did you build TWRP from source or where do you get a reproducible TWRP build from? When I checked some month ago, there was pretty much no documentation available on how to build TWRP from source for my phone. The pre-build TWRP binaries were not reproducible.

I just use the prebuilt binaries. But saying it comes from "some anonymous haxxor" isn't fair to TWRP. The situation is no different from the vast majority of binaries we run (unless if you run gentoo maybe, but if you don't audit all sources I don't see how this adds value).

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