Sinchen vs. Android – Episode ?
(Preparing a tablet for actual usage)
My relationship with Android
Some of you might know my relationship with Android is – to be polite – not the best.
Two reasons for this:
A) The closed nature of the devices (bootloader, root status) and the associated pseudo-security are the main reason for this. All the security theater(!) relies on these (anti-)features. Don't even get me started on the abysmal battery running time of a phone running the Google rubbish in the background. And don't get me started by the privacy catastrophe stock ROMs represent.
Alas, I do have gathered quite a few devices running Android OS. It is not good to criticize things without having at least some basic knowledge.
LineageOS can be a decent operating system if you happen to own one of the few devices which have a port. I still treat Android phones and tablets as toys and not as serious computers:
B) I openly confess that I'm too dumb to correctly use a browser with touch input… and frankly the whole OS. Anything that takes some seconds on the terminal/shell/Bash (such as a simple task as copying a file from internal memory to SD card) becomes a major hassle. This goes as far as me sometimes connecting a phone/tablet to the PC to use it via
adb shell
su
which makes me wonder why I'm using the Android device in the first place – while sitting at my Linux PC. Somehow the phone/tablet is superfluous sitting at the PC… but… without the PC I can't really use it. Still almost all people are sitting in the bus with their heads pointing down and their thumbs flying around on the virtual keyboard of some phone at incomprehensible speed.
Actively using a tablet with LineageOS
Using a touchscreen for typing longer texts is out of question. This is just not gonna work. In the past I used a Windows 10 based tablet with keyboard dock (containing touchpad for mouse support) as surf machine and typewriter. This 150€ PC from 2018 is failing to the point of being unusable (crashes, random reboots, dock physically broken…)
Since I don't like buying new things, especially when owning other things that could do the job, I only bought a cheap generic keyboard+cover. This can be used for still operating the Windows machine but as well an Android tablet. I got it two years ago. Samsung SM-T550, a model from the year 2015 for 30€. To my knowledge Samsung dropped software support for this entry level tablet in 2017. That shows the take on sustainability from a "premium" manufacturer. Well. The stock ROM was toxic waste anyway and on the good side: Samsung devices often have a good third-party support. Security patchlevel December 2023 isn't bad. Sadly Android 11 is almost end of life now.
On all of my important computers I have been using full disk encryption for 15 years or longer, but recently I decided to get rid of pretty much all unencrypted data blanking weak systems with 0x00 and encrypting the rest. This turned out to be a major problem on the tablet. For some reason full disk encryption is marked as deprecated on Android for very long and has been replaced with file based encryption. Searching up and down showed old Android devices don't support the new method (which I would call inferior) which means encryption will not work for those old machines on Android 13 and higher. The same developer is continuing to support this tablet with Android 13.
Big "Thank you!" for retiredtab on XDA forums at this point!
Encryption was the most problematic thing to get working. The ROM/OS itself runs perfectly. Starting the encryption instantly aborted with a reboot (killing the Magisk installation) and no error message.
[RANT]
Who thinks building an OS making computers seemingly(!) accessible for retards is a good idea? And who in their right mind would suppress important error messages hiding them in the logs?! I seriously had to search online how to even get an error message. Why hide something this essential? Just to not scare people away with technical details?
[/RANT]
In the end I had to shrink the data partition a by few kilobytes to have encryption succeed. One problem remains: Startup password is the same as lock screen password. Applying a good passphrase isn't possible under these conditions.
I treat the tablet as having reached the absolute minimum of trustworthiness and even logged into my GBAtemp account. Closed Android devices running stock ROMs have a trustworthiness far below zero. Using the Kivi Browser and Collabora Office for writing is somewhat possible. A bit slow on browsing. Maybe NoScript will help.
A blog entry such as this one is out of range though: How would I cut and resize photos or draw a black box for hiding parts? It would probably take me two days.
