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Yeah, I bought a Pocophone F1 when it came out, expecting to instantly install LineageOS, but then I found out that I have to wait a full week and set up a Windows VM.

The phone per-se wasn't bad, but that was my last purchase from Xiaomi.

Replaced the Pocophone with a Google Pixel 5A and I will stick to Google Pixel because GrapheneOS is great.

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Xiaomi have required this for a while now, not sure exactly when but at least since 2016.

The other big Chinese brands that have cheaper high end handsets don't offically support unlocked bootloaders as far as i know. They subsidize their handsets with all the junk that their custom Android UIs push, so don't want owners to flash a custom ROM.

The top 3 phones in the LineageOS install stats page are Xiaomi for this reason. https://stats.lineageos.org/

Often phones that do support unlocking (without the hoop jumping) you have to pay a premium for, like the Pixel.

The pocophone f1 was for a while the fastest mainline Linux phone. Throw postmarketos on that bad boy.

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