They say a carrier unlocked phone is recommended because carrier locked phones often disable the option to OEM unlock your phone in the Developer settings.
Comment on How do I Graphene OS?
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Honestly, I’m with you - I’ve had people here even get indignant about how “easy it is” to install and use. Yet I have never seen someone here share clear, simple instructions. The official install instructions have phrases like “high quality standards compliant USB-C cable” or “Get a carrier agnostic device” or “4th and 5th generation Pixels only show the first 32 bits of the hash so you can’t use this approach.”
How do I know if my USB-C cable is compliant? How do I make sure my device is carrier agnostic? Hash? I know for most people here, these are trivial questions, but they are opaquely technical for 99% of the people out there. That’s fine, by the way - there is nothing wrong with a quality OS meeting the needs of a hobbyist community with the technical know-how to use it. Just don’t pretend that it is not a niche OS or that it is simple and user-friendly. I say this without any criticism, just as a basic reality check.
PS, in case it was not obvious, please do not answer the example questions. I know that they have answers and that many people here have that knowledge at hand. They are examples of just a few issues that require a base technical knowledge that not everyone possesses.
aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Well, you see, now we are having a conversation about the difference between “carrier unlocked” and “carrier agnostic,” which only seems to prove my point.
blandfordforever@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I’m not a person who had previously done much messing around with their phone but I have installed Linux on several computers. I put graphene on my phone nearly a year ago and I recall the process being fairly straightforward. I think I just followed the instructions on their website.
Maybe it’s not an “any idiot could do it” level of user friendliness but the examples you’ve listed as stumbling blocks aren’t exactly brain-busters.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
My partner is trying to break into open source and I keep suggesting that she tries to focus on making and producing quality documentation for existing projects.
Documentation on most projects sucks donkey balls and if you aren’t used to reading through 16 seemingly unrelated forum posts before you even start, you’re gonna have a bad time.
ugo@feddit.it 3 months ago
Seems like a bad idea unless she’s very familiar with the projects she would help document. Documentation is notoriously not something that can be produced by a newcomer, because it requires experience that a newcomer doesn’t have.
I guess the best way for a newcomer would try to use the product and ask every little question they have to make sure they receive the correct answers and context and, at the end of the process, enough knowledge would help gained to contribute at least one piece of documentation. But the bulk of the knowledge would still come from people that already know the product, so in terms of efficiency it’s way worse than having the authors write it.
Of course, if the authors are unwilling or unable to write good (or any, even) documentation, having someone that has the will to gather the scattered information into a central place and work on it so it’s digestible and high quality is still unbelievably useful.
But yeah, my point being that documentation is far trickier than it seems as far as open source contributions go.