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

  • Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Albbi@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • Rexios@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      There is hard and soft bricking. Soft bricking means the phone is unusable, but fixable. Hard bricking means the phone is permanently unusable.

      • MeThisGuy@feddit.nl
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        4 months ago

        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

        • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          The term exists, and has been used in rooting circles since at least 2012 that I know of, since that was when I rooted my first device and ran across the term.

          While it certainly doesn’t make much sense as a term, that’s different from the term not existing.

        • Rexios@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Would you build a house out of a metaphorical term? It’s not literal. If a phone doesn’t boot it’s as useful as a brick until you fix it.

        • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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          4 months ago

          Soft Brick => You can build the house with a lot of them, but when the wolf huffs and puffs, it will fall.

          Hard Brick => The house you build, will not be breakable by the wolf’s huffing and puffing.

          CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • Zoot@reddthat.com
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          4 months ago

          Soft bricking always meant the os failed but you still have a bootloader. A fully bricked phone has no bootloader and is the typical definition.

          This was an incredibly common issue back in the day. Some times you could even have the appearance of no bootloader but still be able to get it back to a usable state. You thanked the gods if that happened.

        • Rexios@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          What the fuck are you talking about. I was playing with custom roms 12 years ago and it was definitely a term people used. If anyone is ignorant here it’s you.

    • numberfour002@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • JoshCodes@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          Yeah like if it even partially functions as intended, it is not a brick. I once attempted flashing firmware to a motherboard, only for my power to go out midway through. Kaput, $200 down the drain, I no longer had an electronic device, I had the world’s most expensive paperweight.

      • Dymonika@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        “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.

  • fernandu00@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    I was astonished that I installed lineage with microg on my xiaomi last year and without bricking it not even once.

    • DavidGarcia@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        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.

    • Fugtig Fisk@feddit.dk
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      4 months ago

      Xiaomi is pretty complicated though isn’t it?. You need to register with xiaomi to get permission if i am not wrong?

      • fernandu00@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        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

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    no but seriously we need better instructions and community.

    trying to find telegram channels to get support from teenagers isnt the best. they will have to learn that lesson all over again wont they?

  • communism@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    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…)

    • Hellfire103@lemmy.caOP
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • orcaA
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    4 months ago

    Congrats! I still have a Nexus 5 that’s been running it for years. It’s great.

    • Hellfire103@lemmy.caOP
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      4 months ago

      It seems to be running well on my Galaxy Tab A7. Definitely better than One UI or whatever it came with.

    • Hellfire103@lemmy.caOP
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      4 months ago

      Well, you can still get pretty far with GrapheneOS. Pixels can be re-locked, which is a feature I wish all Android devices had.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    4 months ago

    I have two spare old phones…but the screens are both broken…😞

    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Really depends on your phone, different models present different levels of difficulties from very easy to literally impossible.

        • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Haha you expect people to read? I just copy and paste the commands in terminal and yolo it.

          /s of course lol

          • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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            4 months ago

            Can confirm.

            I work with developers who refuse to read the documentation that I spent hours, creating and refuse to read the code which has easily been made available (at their own demand) - and then come to me asking for explanations that are already written.

    • Godort@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • DavidGarcia@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      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

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        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.