Low key it was fun flashing roms back in Late 2023 on a Xiaomi Phone.
The only unfun part was unlocking the bootloader

Look at this: https://liberux.net/

I'm glad I heard of Discord's plan to add ads to their Android app beforehand so I had the chance to disable updates. It's annoying that Android keeps reminding me there's an update available, but it's less annoying than ads.

This is why I moved to iPhone a few years ago. Every premium android was a legit knockoff of iPhone in every single way, down to the lack of a headphone jack and SD card slot. Why continue chasing these phones that aren’t even as good as the real thing?

Android USED TO be better than iPhone, but Google is just gung-ho on enshitification. Apple, for the walled garden that it is, at least works well with its eco system. Android is so fragmented and complicated that it’s collapsing under its own weight.

I just hate that so much. The openness was one of the two reasons why I got an android phone. The other one being the price.

I did alright with mine. I figure a modern one would have modern hardware in it. People forget how dire the performance on the first couple of iPhone generations was, too. The N900's contemporary was the iPhone 3GS, I think, which was an objectively terrible device in every metric except sales.

Oh, and the N900's inbuilt phone dialer was also kind of ass. But I found its performance more than acceptable, and it could run full fat Firefox including the Flash plugin, which was still a big deal at the time, whereas its competitors could barely render a web page.

Yeah app purchases sure went to shit, didn't they? Sorry turns out buying an app one time for a small fee isn't good enough, we need you to buy it again every month.

CyanogenMod, how I loved thee

Blocking basically all ads on your phone is trivially easy.

1. Find "Private DNS" (or something similar) in your settings
2. Set it to dns.adguard-dns.com

And that's really it. There are other ad-blocking dns providers out there, and they all use slightly different block lists. I like adguard because their blocklist is less aggressive than others I've tried, and I'd rather an ad or two get through than for something legitimate to stop working.

You can also set it up as your dns provider in your router to block ads on your entire network. People tend to like to self-host adguard or pihole for that, but as long as you don't care about a dashboard or manual dns entries, using a free dns is as easy as it gets and is very effective. I self-host as a hobby and I still just use adguard's public dns.

I would eat their foot for this

Lmao, yeah, batteries have improved quite substantially for all phones in the last 14 years. Unless you want removable batteries, then everything is worse now.

And the apps that do have lifetime licenses went from $5 to like $80

YES! I was talking with someone recently about this ROM. I couldn't remember what it was called, but I had decked out my phone on a fully wild unicorn theme based on it lmao.

What's the % of US users that use non-Apple non-Android smartphones, like <0.1% still right? I basically just use phone, SMS, browser and youtube on mine so possible I'll switch over when its tried and tested enough. Some tech experience but not enough with phones, specifically to be confident.

i cant wait for mobile Linux to be ready, I will switch in a heartbeat.

I was really rooting for Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS. Sadly barely any manufacturers offered it stock, so classic henn and egg problem.

Pinephone exists now, you can buy it today. It runs Linux.

Calls/SMS do work although are not 100% so if you absolutely need these to be reliable you could get a brick phone for like £15 to cover that and then use the Pinephone as a pocket computer. I used it as my only phone for a couple of years and it was mostly fine, now it doesn't have a SIM in it and its perfect as a pocket PC.

Most relatable meme in a while, feels weird to feel so much nostalgia for an Operating system

I've been looking to switch as well... But it's hard to find a supported device.
Dammit, I want Mobian so bad...

I'm probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don't seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I've heard) pretty decently: https://furilabs.com/

Biggest drawback is it's based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn't worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.

Collection of different experiences I've variously seen online over the last year or so:

• https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2025/07-20-flx1-actually-usable-linux-phone.gmi
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41839326
• https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1fa1ljn/furilabs_flx1/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1j46f2w/flx1_linux_phone_display_out/
• https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/

I don't own one, myself, so I can't give any personal experience but I've seen it around for a few years now but most people don't seem to even know about it. Maybe there's a reason for that? But none I've ever seen anyone say.