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Comment by new_stranger | Hacker News Reader

Took about 10 minutes to install and most of that was just waiting for the os to transfer to the phone. Really easy install guide. Works great. I wouldn't ask grandma to do it, but the technical crowd here probably isn't scared of running a couple cli commands.

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That still doesn't address the issue that it's community-supported and can disappear at any time. Cyanogenmod used to be the main alternative ROM back in the day, and disappeared virtually overnight? It came back as LineageOS but it still meant that people had to reinstall (or somehow convert their Cyanogen install into Lineage, if that's possible) which takes time.

There's also the endless juggles of "is this phone supported, do I need to root it, is the root current, no wait this version is just different enough from that version that I need a custom version of the ROM from a third party, oh the SOC means that the kernel can't be patched for security problems" and so on.

It's a non-trivial effort.

> There's also the endless juggles of "is this phone supported

Stop only caring after the fact if you've bought a device with a path to freedom.

Ah yes, the answer to "I would like a reasonable degree of support and security for my phone without having to be a full time sysadmin" is "treat your phone like a 1997 Linux PC project.

I devote significant time to avoiding taking on sysadmin tasks. Just got Frontier Fiber. Had always done my own network admin, but they throw in a couple of routers and I decided it was better to have something they supported than try to make sure I had coverage on every square inch (sorry from USA) of yard. We'll see if I am happy with that choice.

I can tolerate an extra install every five to ten years.

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