One issue for this process that I have seen when talking about the Pixel is:
- ***You can't actually back up your Pixel***
It's enormously frustrating, because this is the typical advice before moving to a different OS. But apparently, actually mounting the device or seeing it via `lsblk` is from what I can tell impossible.
I tried for a while to simply make a direct image with `dd` to try out other OSes etc but I couldn't even figure out a way to mount it, or in the cases it could be mounted it was using some insanely stupid fuse fs that was specifically made to be difficult to use.
They want you to use some ridiculously complex and idiotic idea that revolves around using the cloud for backups, which I couldn't figure out precisely what was done because it isn't open source, so I refuse to use it. It's insane that you can't just `dd if=/dev/sdX of=phone.img` or something simple.
Yep. It was fun while it lasted, but I expect none of the manufacturers will support hacking or mods on these devices in the future because there's too few people doing that compared to the masses they want to sell to, and they have zero time or money to train technical support staff. They want to sell you an appliance that can't be repaired, has planned obsolescence and locks you into the platform by (effectively) keeping your data hostage.
If you actually care about FLOSS on your phone, you might be interested in trying a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone). Those have no restrictions on mounting or alternative operating systems.
