Currently in the process of installing Lineageos on my brothers redmi note 10 pro.

Its a huge pain compared to my phone, mainly because unlocking the bootloader requires an account with his number connected. Then I had to install Windows to use their shitty unlock app, which the requires you to wait up to 30 days for seemingly no reason. Luckily “just” a week for us.

But yeah the hardware is amazing.

Also a bit confused by this. I thought the point of searxng is to combine your preferred search engines. So couldn’t I just configure ddg for the image results?

Yes, Aurora is not the ideal solution and Google might be cracking down on it soon. But as long as it works I don’t really mind it going through Google, at least I don’t need an account for it.

And sadly many Apps are just made with Google in mind because it’s so popular, but my hope is that in the future more and more Apps will have at least a Google free option.

Mobian sounds cool, but doesn’t seem so promising to me as well. I agree that custom ROM’s are not in a good spot right now, but I think it’s gonna get better in the future.

I know that many people still rely on Google’s services, but speaking from my own experience, it’s not hard to ditch them entirely.

I installed LineageOS 2 months ago, and was only missing my banking app, which I installed using the Aurora store and it works without any issues. For everything else I found alternatives which are, admittedly not as good/users friendly as Google’s. But I wouldn’t say there’s no true FOSS phone OS.

Aren’t custom ROM’s open source? It would be nice if you could buy a phone from big brands with it preinstalled already. That would make it so much more accesible.

I feel the same way. I switched to NewPipe recently, while degoogling my phone for privacy reasons, but I’m still using YouTube when I’m at my desktop. The recommendations are just better at finding new content for me.

Have you tried installing it with no internet connection? That’s what I always used to do, to get a local account during installation.

I was also curious, so I found this page. It looks nothing like the screenshot (maybe because Im on mobile), and the only sentence coming close, under the “Extra online protection” heading, is: “Reduce online tracking by hiding your IP address”. As if that means anything if you have Google apps installed on your phone.

But after reading more, I found a link to their how-it-works page, which then linked to their github page. Is beeing open-source really enough to show it’s secure and private? I still wouldn’t trust them.

If you own the car; I would say it’s completely reasonable to modify it, as long as its still legaly able to drive after. In Germany your car needs to be regulary checked by TÜV to be street legal.

If this is legal probably depends on where you live, but I would be suprised if it’s illegal in any developed country. (Im not a lawyer btw.)