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.
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.
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.
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
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...)
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.
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.
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
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.