So a couple months ago, I accidently shattered the screen of my (fucking terrible) Nord N10. So that gave me an excuse to finally buy a new phone. Except all the new phones seem to be absolutely shit and locked down nowadays.

Trying to find a phone with an unlockable bootloader, has custom ROM support, SD card slot and a headphone jack is something that is next to impossible. I been trying to figure out my options, and essentially narrowed it down to these:

Out of the list, it seems the most easiest to get a custom ROM running are probably Pixel phones. However these phones lack SD cards and headphone jacks, not to mention that they are really expensive to buy, especially with the larger storage options.

Xiaomi are among most common brand sold here, but these require a lotta bullshit to get the bootloader unlock: it takes weeks to get the bootloader unlocked, but on the flipside: i get my SD card and headphone jack back (depending on the Xiaomi phone I choose)

I had some experience with Motorola in the past: unlocking bootloaders on these devices are pretty easy, and require nothing but a code to unlock (however this was a very long time ago). Not as good as on the Pixel devices, which can be unlocked with a single command, but still okay. Moto phones are also readily available here.

I don’t like Oneplus. The previous experience I had was very negative, especially with updates in in their budget phones. To add to that, the more budget oriented Oneplus phones barely get any custom ROM development, which makes the bootloader unlocking nearly pointless.

I would love to get my hands on a Fairphone, but they are very expensive phones that offer really middling hardware for the price, but it is the price you pay to get an exceptionally repairable phone. Not to mention the price markup for importing one here, it turns a 700 dollar phone to over 1000 dollars. What a shame.

Another option that I can chose is to simply repair the phone I already have. This would require me to repair the screen, and while we’re doing that, we need to also replace the battery, which has been left at a 70% capacity after years of use. However, I am frankly tired of the stupid quirks and issues this phone has:

Honestly trying to find a phone that has all the requirements I mentioned earlier is hard. But at least I did manage to find a couple devices, almost all being Motorola phones. There also good Pixel phones in the same price bracket as well (but that would make me have to give the headphone jack and SD card up. However I could save a chunk of money, just by repairing the phone that I have now. Who knows.

Tangent 1: linux stuff

So apparently it has been three months since I started using Linux on this laptop, and the experience this time is pretty good actually. Maybe I'll talk about it later mayhaps.

Tangent 2:

mfw i had to edit this fucking page 3 times because i forget to format the lists properly lmao