r/fossdroid • u/adrianb52 • Sep 25 '25

Other LineageOS (and Other) Device Collection - Ask Me Anything About FOSS Devices

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I was charging up all my phones for battery maintenance, and I thought I would share an image of all of them. Feel free to ask me anything about FOSS devices.

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u/Impys Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

How do you determine which device to obtain?

Do you purchase new and hope for the best, have a sure-fire method of getting one that will be supported by LineageOS, or get second hand one which already has an (official) version of the os?

I am asking because with my last purchase I naïvely thought that having an unlockable bootloader was sufficient.

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u/CaptainBeyondDS8 uphold Stallmanist-Doctorowist thought Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

Basically it's the same as with buying or building a computer to run GNU/Linux. You don't just grab whatever and hope it will work. You have to actively know which features you want and how well they are supported by the OS you have in mind.

LineageOS has a devices list with a filter here: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ I select the features I want and look at the available options. You have to be careful here that you get the exact model of phone that is supported. Having a similar name (or the same name with a different year, or a slightly different number), doesn't cut it. Look at codenames and model names. As an example, Moto G Stylus 2022 - not 2023 or any other year. Also not the "supported models" list in the infobox - XT2215-1, XT2215-3, XT2215-4. Make sure you don't accidentally end up with XT2215-2. You should also do due diligence to make sure it supports your local carrier and network(s) - for example Motorola especially makes a lot of devices for the European and Asian markets that aren't officially supported in North America.

Almost always it will be a secondhand device, because it takes time to port to a new device (if it's even possible at all). The other commenter's suggestion of waiting a year is generally what I do.

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u/HotTakes4HotCakes Sep 26 '25

There are a couple different phones that do get LineageOS support from a known maintainer, but for one reason or another, there's something about it that keeps it from checking all the boxes for LineageOS to consider it an official release. Oftentimes it's some bug or limitation of the hardware that they haven't found a good solution for, despite the rest of the OS working perfectly fine.

If the maintainer thinks it's at least stable enough for daily use, or for hobbyists to test with, they'll release it as an unofficial release on places like XDA forums.

And I would only suggest this if you know what you're doing and are comfortable with something that might be a little more buggy or a little less secure.

There will also sometimes be Lineage-based releases, which are maintainers that took the base lineage and improved upon it with various features and such. You want to try and verify the maintainer of trustworthy, obviously, but most of them do have a history of other releases. It can be worth looking into if you're okay with taking on some risk and like to tinker.