DeGoogle Yourself @lemmy.ml Hellfire103 @lemmy.ca 3 mo. ago

I only soft-bricked it five times!

EDIT: Added soft- to the title, since it was pissing people off. Maybe I'm still wrong. Idk, it's just a meme.

44 comments

If you didn't need to buy a new phone you didn't brick it. The name comes from the device becoming as useful as a brick. IE filling physical space.
- Yeah, bricking something makes it completely unusable anymore: ie. turned into nothing more than a brick. If you can access it and restore functionality then it wasn't bricked.
- There is hard and soft bricking. Soft bricking means the phone is unusable, but fixable. Hard bricking means the phone is permanently unusable.
  
  would you build a house out of soft bricks? no.. they don't exist.
  bricking is permanently fucking it up. as useful as a phone as a brick. aka a paper weight
  
  soft bricking
  
  You mean like, shutting down your laptop? 😅
  
  Stop trying to hijack terms to excuse your ignorance of them. “Soft bricking” isn’t a thing.
- I mean soft-bricked. I fixed it, but it made things more difficult.
- I bricked my wireless mouse the other day. Accidentally pulled the USB dongle receiver out of my computer when I thought I was pulling out my micro thumbdrive, they're about the same size and same color.
  
  Long story short, the mouse stopped working. Completely bricked until I realized my mistake and plugged the receiver back in.
  
  Then it’s not a brick, it’s just turned off.
  
  Bricked is permanently broken, will never work again, kaput, paper weighted, pet-rocked, like a brick. You can’t get a brick to POST.
  
  The whole point of the term bricked is to denote permanence.
- ?
  
  Softbrick vs hardbrick?
  
  "Bricking" means rendering a phone permanently unusable other than as an effective brick. If what OP said was true, then OP went through 5 phones before getting it to work.
- Soft-bricked
I was astonished that I installed lineage with microg on my xiaomi last year and without bricking it not even once.
- it usually is pretty painless if you don't buy a brand new device or a very popular one. but idiot me always gets a 2 month old extremely obscure device.
  
  Any Pixel or Fairphone will work even if brand new usually. With Pixels you dont even need a bootloader unlock code, but they are honestly kinda trash devices in terms of repairabilty and features. Get yourself a Fairphone fellas, best decision i ever made (If you can live with a bit of thicc boi of a phone). Slap CalyxOS on dat thang and enjoy life.
- Xiaomi is pretty complicated though isn't it?. You need to register with xiaomi to get permission if i am not wrong?
  
  Yeah but once you do that and unlock the bootloader, installing lineage was too easy. Last time I tried that (it was called cyanogenmod yet) I spent a hole weekend trying to recover my nexus 4
no but seriously we need better instructions
Misuse of bricking aside—I've never had an issue with installing GrapheneOS. Never actually used another degoogled AOSP-based OS, so can't compare it, but I'd definitely say GrapheneOS is at least very "normie"-friendly in terms of being easy and intuitive to use, and simple enough to install so long as you know how to read and are capable of following instructions (which I'm aware many users are not...)
- Well, GrapheneOs is a bit easier. GOS uses a WebUSB installer, which does a lot of the work for you.
  
  LineageOS requires things like ADB and Fastboot. In my case, however, it was a Samsung device, so I had to install Windows and then mess around with Odin.
  
  I also ended up soft-bricking the device by trying to sideload the OS before it had finished downloading.
Congrats! I still have a Nexus 5 that’s been running it for years. It’s great.
- It seems to be running well on my Galaxy Tab A7. Definitely better than One UI or whatever it came with.
@hellfire103 As long as the bootloader needs to stay unlocked for using the phone, LOS will never be an option for me.
- I mean I can think of one or two reasons why, but why is this an issue for you?
- Well, you can still get pretty far with GrapheneOS. Pixels can be re-locked, which is a feature I wish all Android devices had.
I have two spare old phones...but the screens are both broken...😞
How? LOS is installed via sideload. It's hard to mess it up.
- Really depends on your phone, different models present different levels of difficulties from very easy to literally impossible.
  
  Makes sense but I always thought that LOS install guides were so detailed you couldn't miss anything
- There are loads of people out there that want stuff like this but dont have computer-related hobbies.
  
  It makes perfect sense if you understand what you're doing at each step, but if you've never used a command line before, each instruction would look like arcane gibberish.
- I remember a time when MicroG didn't exist, we has to walk barefoot 50 miles uphill both ways in a snowstorm just to get the privilege of bicking my device twice a day
  
  I'm still not wise enough to comprehend the life of custom ROM users back then. Reading manuals of that era always causes my brain to error out before even finishing the initial reading.

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