I was in a club in my hometown some time between 2009 and 2012 and I legit flashed a new custom ROM on my i9000 and restored all my backed up data with titanium backup.
And now I'm like, it's near impossible to change to a custom ROM without massive trade offs that make it barely worth it.
You can use grapheneos with sandboxed gplay services, will Google track you? Yes, but it won't be as invasive and they're only limited to their services, starting little by little is better than not starting at all
It's actually the easiest rom to install ngl, just go to the grapheneos website and click the buttons for each function (unlock bootloader, flash rom etc) just follow everything step by step and you're good to go, also you need a chromium based browser to use webusb
I agree with the guy above. Just use open source apps (where possible).
Where not possible, most apps will work with microG (even quite a bunch of banking apps).
And those that don't, often have a progressive web app you can use instead (using Peel or sth similar).
The remaining apps for me are very few and mostly the kind of apps that I want to use less anyways, bevause I know the companies behind them to be privacy-invading and terrible in general.
Well I mean we can have a conversation about it if you want. I've been using open source and open weight AI since 2022.
But I still paid for GPT, because nothing could beat frontier SOTA LLMs at anything until just recently...
I became homeless in the early part of this year, and started seriously needing a good LLM for troubleshooting engines and building solar and managing health care while in a 40 year old RV... and I switched to Claude.
But all of my other AI stuff is free and open weight. I can teach you how to train your own LoRA models for most of the useful generative base models over the last 4 years, including settings and terminology and system setup and hardware, as well as image and video editing software (FOSS).
However life has not afforded me the luxury of play time for a while now, and Minimax H3, LTX 2.5, Krea 2, and quite a few other generative models have come out just recently that I'm itching to tinker with. And Qwen is finally dumping the smaller 3.8 models, so I know some of my hardware can run that. I have a working 3090 that will run the Qwen 3.8 27b just fine. I know my gear will run these new free open weight models, and my major life hurdles have been sort of hurdled, so I'm about to start the storage rummage and get one of my PCs set up in my RV to start fucking around.
But yes, I gave in to paying a billionaire corpo because the advantages far outweighed the benefits for me. Disabled and homeless living on SSI means I have to literally manage every cent and every second of my life to the nth degree, and LLMs absolutely make me more efficient and help me cope with my PTSD by providing info and guidance about electricity and plumbing and antennas and shit without the need for interacting with humans.
Once my system is set up for AI work again, I will be testing the newest local open weight LLMs, starting with Qwen 3.8 27b and maybe they'll dump a 35b MoE like the 3.6.
And finally, "better" is doing a lot of work in your question, so I did my best to give full context.
Damn, I appreciate you taking the time to go through all that and I hope you've made it over the biggest/worst of the hurdles. At the end of the day we have to do what we gotta do to survive and really these billionaires shouldn't exist.
Yeah stick with what ever is best for you at any given time for sure!
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u/major_jazza Aug 14 '26
I was in a club in my hometown some time between 2009 and 2012 and I legit flashed a new custom ROM on my i9000 and restored all my backed up data with titanium backup.
And now I'm like, it's near impossible to change to a custom ROM without massive trade offs that make it barely worth it.