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Comment by weare138 | Hacker News Reader

It should be required for vendors to unlock the bootloader on hardware devices that have reached EOL. Think of how much e-waste we could reduce if we were able to repurpose hardware we already own instead of it just going into a landfill or worse incinerated which is often the case with e-waste shipped overseas to low income areas for disposal.

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When Galaxy Upcycling was first announced, it was extremely ambitious. However, the final product was cut down by a lot to make room for the economics.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/50450/samsung-galaxy-upcycling-u...

To be honest, it sort of makes sense, why would they want to open themselves upto unlimited brand damage liability from battery fires, while spending untold amount of man hours porting mainline linux onto obsolete platforms they'll never see a cent from anymore - whether it be in other products or through services revenue.

They should just provide drivers for something like Debian. From there on, people could run web servers, Docker, source control servers, NAS stuff, and so on.

Most of the time, Android vendors do provide the drivers (yay GPL), but they're so specific to Android or so poor quality that you'd better think twice about using them anywhere else. They're also out of tree patches, so porting them to a newer kernel is a job unto itself

Debian mostly only distributes mainline Linux kernels, so they should instead contribute to the upstream Linux kernel community.

Maybe it's different in the US, but in Europe, all Samsung phones can have their bootloader unlocked via a simple two-step procedure, so end users can flash whatever they like as the OS. They also have all their Linux kernel source code, along with any changes they've made to other open source components, available at https://opensource.samsung.com, so you can build custom kernels if needed, or port drivers to a mainline branch.

I've repurposed an old Galaxy S7 to run as a remote development server, via this method. I have it set up so it's just like logging into any other Linux box.

It's very different in the US. It's impossible to unlock the bootloaders, get root, etc. Occasionally someone finds a vuln, but as a general rule, no rooting etc samsung phones in the US :/

it's trivial. use this tool:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/patched-odin-3-13-1.37625...

do note, the patched out safety checks will definitely allow you to shoot yourself in the foot if you flash the wrong images

>It's very different in the US. It's impossible to unlock the bootloaders, get root, etc.

Sounds like the US would benefit from some EU style legislation.

I don't think it's legislation that causes this. Huawei sold un-unlockable phones in the EU while they were still around.

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