**Wanted to update this post with a website I found that has info about this topic for regular people, in case anybody finds this later. ** Privacy Focused OS For Everyone It has info about the different os options as well as apps for phones using regular android.
Pretend I am five and please be nice.
Say I want to free my phone and tablet from samsung/google/skynet but I neeeeeed to be able to use my printer and external cd drives and their silly proprietary apps, as well as flash drives, cds, and normal apps without alternatives like bandcamp and libby and and all that. I also need to be able to use government websites and use my wifi and pay bills and just generally do everything that I do now on samsung's/motorola's software.
(Most of these things were issues for me when I tried to use linux years ago which is why I'm listing them. I do not possess the technical ability to solve these problems on my own when they come up. I also do not possess any other devices to use if my main ones can't do these things anymore.)
Is this realistic in 2024 for Graphene or any other free open source os? And if it is, how do I install it safely and properly?
Are there any known issues with it like slowness or not being able to use the camera, etc? Most of the places with information about this stuff are not written in a langauge I speak.
Edit: does anyone want to work on creating or collecting some simplified tutorials with me? I'm thinking of installing one of these on my phone and it it goes well I will probably write the details down. It might be good to have a place for other people who have done so, or want to, to do the same for their respective devices.
Honestly, I'm with you - I've had people here even get indignant about how "easy it is" to install and use. Yet I have never seen someone here share clear, simple instructions. The official install instructions have phrases like "high quality standards compliant USB-C cable" or "Get a carrier agnostic device" or "4th and 5th generation Pixels only show the first 32 bits of the hash so you can't use this approach."
How do I know if my USB-C cable is compliant? How do I make sure my device is carrier agnostic? Hash? I know for most people here, these are trivial questions, but they are opaquely technical for 99% of the people out there. That's fine, by the way - there is nothing wrong with a quality OS meeting the needs of a hobbyist community with the technical know-how to use it. Just don't pretend that it is not a niche OS or that it is simple and user-friendly. I say this without any criticism, just as a basic reality check.
PS, in case it was not obvious, please do not answer the example questions. I know that they have answers and that many people here have that knowledge at hand. They are examples of just a few issues that require a base technical knowledge that not everyone possesses.
My partner is trying to break into open source and I keep suggesting that she tries to focus on making and producing quality documentation for existing projects.
Documentation on most projects sucks donkey balls and if you aren't used to reading through 16 seemingly unrelated forum posts before you even start, you're gonna have a bad time.
Seems like a bad idea unless she’s very familiar with the projects she would help document. Documentation is notoriously not something that can be produced by a newcomer, because it requires experience that a newcomer doesn’t have.
I guess the best way for a newcomer to help would be to try to use the product and ask every little question they have to make sure they receive the correct answers and context and, at the end of the process, enough knowledge would be gained to contribute at least one piece of documentation. But the bulk of the knowledge would still come from people that already know the product, so in terms of efficiency it’s way worse than having the authors write it.
Of course, if the authors are unwilling or unable to write good (or any, even) documentation, having someone that has the will to gather the scattered information into a central place and work on it so it’s digestible and high quality is still unbelievably useful.
But yeah, my point being that documentation is far trickier than it seems as far as open source contributions go.
They say a carrier unlocked phone is recommended because carrier locked phones often disable the option to OEM unlock your phone in the Developer settings.
Well, you see, now we are having a conversation about the difference between "carrier unlocked" and "carrier agnostic," which only seems to prove my point.
I'm not a person who had previously done much messing around with their phone but I have installed Linux on several computers. I put graphene on my phone nearly a year ago and I recall the process being fairly straightforward. I think I just followed the instructions on their website.
Maybe it's not an "any idiot could do it" level of user friendliness but the examples you've listed as stumbling blocks aren't exactly brain-busters.