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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

I installed LineageOS on my old Samsung Galaxy S3 back in the day. It's currently only used as a fancy alarm clock, I got an app that requires me to solve math problems to disable alarm.

Just yesterday I was wondering if it was still supported by LineageOS, and I see that it is not. What are the chances that a new version will work on this "ancient" device?

And even if I do, would it be safe enough to use or does the hardware have serious, unfixable flaws?

Got me thinking about the obsolescence of our modern gadgets.

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Since the S3 Neo is still supported, I don't see why the S3 wouldn't be. As far as safety, at a bare minimum it would only be as unsafe as the stock rom, though having newer patches to the kernel / android does mitigate a lot of vulnerabilities

The Galaxy S3 and the Galaxy S3 Neo are entirely different devices from a software engineering perspective. The device name is not a reliable indicator for this.

There are unofficial Lineage 18 and 19 builds available:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/rom-unofficial-11-0-i9305...

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/rom-unofficial-12-0l-i930...

However, "random reboots" doesn't sound great for a daily driver...

But just look around in the forum, sometimes there's a good alternative, it doesn't have to be Lineage.

  > It's currently only used as a fancy alarm clock, I got an app that requires me to solve math problems to disable alarm.

I use Solid Alarm Clock on a relatively-new Note 10 Lite for this purpose.

Depends what you want to use the phone for. If there's no network access intended, then obsolete software doesn't matter as much as the device has a much lower attack surface.

It just got me thinking if the device could be used as a primary driver with updated software, or if that would be too risky due to hardware issues.

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