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Comment by ReptileMan | Hacker News Reader

Okay - so which devices are left that are easily rootable? I will be in the market for new one soon. It's good if EU after mandating usb-c also mandates unlockable bootloaders for whomever wants it.

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All pixel phones are very easy to unlock the bootloader, and Google publishes factory images. So if your root goes wrong or you need to revert to stock, it is very easy. The actual process of obtaining root is as easy as it is on any other device, which is to say, I wish it was a lot easier, but it is very doable.

As a bonus, it also opens the door for Graphene OS should you choose to go that direction.

Pixels can also be re-locked with a custom ROM present (I think Graphene is the only one that does this, though). For that reason alone I'll be transitioning back to Pixel (once this phone is beyond help).

CalxyOS is the other one, with less problematic developer history.

What are the history problems with graphene?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089104

In tech as in all of life, wellness of those in leadership can be ephemeral and is never to be taken for granted or assumed. I wish good health to all involved.

Up until your comma the comment suited me just fine, but then... let's not get personal about developers' health issues. It isn't helpful, and there has already been an HN discussion on the topic that you've unfortunately exhumed. There has been great progress at solving problems that had come up during a sad time for GrapheneOS and CalyxOS.

I understand that position, but one can also not simply ignore the situation. It'd be okay if the project had removed the maintainer, but they did not, instead he just sabotaged the Mozilla location service discussion while purporting to speak in the name of the Graphene foundation. There is a responsibility to warn users about that risk factor.

GrapheneOS and CalyxOS are great at what they do, and the present situation for both is positive and good. It can be exhausting digging up old interpersonal stuff that does not have a technical bearing on the present, especially as there are/were health and wellbeing issues that are/were at play. Choose to let it go, for once and for all. Peace out.

No, that's sadly not true. With the stepping down having been cancelled and the recently repeated paranoid accusations in https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065#issuecomment-... the present situation of GrapheneOS is far from good, it's an "absolutely do not use and do not recommend the project"-situation. This maintainer being active and continuing his bullying is way too risky for the users of the project (and the FOSS android ecosystem as a whole).

But let's indeed let it be here, it gets OT for the ASUS topic. The GrapheneOS warning just had to be mentioned as it was related to the bootloader re-locking.

CalyxOS has been working well for me and I recommend it. I appreciate how the included microG allows me to disable Firebase Cloud Messaging for any app that I don't need push notifications for. Having push notifications without Google Ads or Google Analytics is great.

I'll judge a tech project on it's technological merits and developers by their technical skills. GrapheneOS is by far the superior choice.

No aux port though.

From Electrical Engineering apps to my various current/normal/legacy hardware that uses aux... I don't want to carry around a dongle. Ever. I don't want to attach them to things. I just want my phone to have the $3 peripheral.

The pixel 4a is the last good phone that's small, rootable, with a headphone jack and good rom options.

I just looked it up... they actually sell Factory 5a... what? No...

Maybe I misunderstand the posting.

They stopped including headphone jacks at some point, IIRC after the 4a.

Lenovo's Moto phones

I recently got Lenovo Moto G7 Plus (not recent but recent enough for their purpose), because LineageOS fully supports them [1].

Then I found out to unlock the bootloader I had to:

1. get a string via a `fastboot` command

2. create a motorola.com account

3. paste string in some motorola.com page to get an "unlock code" emailed IF Motorola decides your device is "unlockable"

4. `fastboot oem unlock UNLOCK_CODE`

5. connect phone to the Internet and wait between 3 and 7 days [2] (turned out to be 3 or 4)

Until I did all that shit, the option to unlock the bootloader in system settings was grayed out.

Afterwards the device works well, but it was a terrible experience and I DO NOT recommend Motorola devices for rooting based on this.

[1]: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices

[2]: https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-fix-oem-unlock-greyed-out-or-o...

Oh, ew, they've really regressed then. Step 5 is new:(

Seriously sad. I am such an Asus fan after their insanely good gaming laptops.. $500-900 and you can run AI Art and LLMs.

I didn't expect their laptop dominance to exactly extend to Androids. I was hopeful.

I should have probably known better, apparently they don't do native linux support. I had to use some Fedora fanboy stuff to get my peripherals to work. It was easy, but still couldn't use most distros.

Xiaomi phones are also pretty good for Custom ROMs.

I'm in love with fairphones

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