fensgrim

> except countries like Russia

Can confirm, here it'll be problematic for one to speak in English with anyone younger than 16 / older than 40 and/or outside major population centers. (though in my experience, its the same situation with English in Austria and Russian in Latvia/Lithuania).

yeah, good luck restoring full userdata and metadata partitions on a rooted pixel 4 and newer: you definitely can do that (and bypass TPM), but since there's no working twrp, there's no exactly easy way to dump/restore partition image with dd anymore.

"A default LineageOS installation" as in "a device which is officially supported through https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/" is like that, indeed, and while most of the unofficial builds come with as -userdebug, no root, there's a high chance of encountering either a flaky build (permissive selinux) or having to fallback to a GSI build, some of them, and nowadays it means AndyCGYan's [0], come with optional root enabled.

As for backup: stock backup facilities (adb backup/restore) aren't exactly the best thing for sure, (rip Titanium Backup, Seedvault isn't even remotely there), and TWRP is broken on most of devices with modern encryption support (specifically, on Pixels). Coincidentally, Mediatek SoC based devices are the 'best' when talking about backup (as in: you can dump and clone all partitions through a built-in service mode [1]).

0. https://sourceforge.net/projects/andyyan-gsi/files/ 1. https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient

For a 204-mhz device (as in: not using basic 16mhz NRF52840) it seems to be surprisingly limited.