Or at least I tried.

I had a great idea to try using a Samsung Galaxy S5 I had from ages past and use it as a daily driver. I immediately ran into issues: Android 5, the OS the phone came with, is no longer supported by many applications; not to mention modern SIM cards are Nano-SIM, and the Galaxy S5 takes Micro-SIM. Thankfully, the Nano-Micro fiasco can be easily solved by buying a kit off of Amazon. The ROM was a bit of a different story.

Way back in the day, I used XDA Forums to find all my ROMS. My first ROM was MOAR, aka Mother of All ROMs. I’ve tried various other ROMs on various other phones to varying degrees of success. More stories of those are sure to come on this site. Of course, in 2021, XDA is now mostly barren, a sad ghost town that used to thrive with all sorts of ROMS. It’s still active, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t receive nearly the same amount of traffic as it used to.

It was still my first choice to look at XDA, though. I tried a few of the ROMS: Resurrection Remix and official LineageOS. But Resurection Remix didn’t boot for me, and LineageOS is almost cliche. I threw on some other ROMs, trying PostmarketOS, LuneOS, and trying in vain to build Ubuntu Touch. None of these really worked either. So I turned to /e/. Now /e/ doesn’t do anything particularly crazy: it’s mostly LineageOS with some goodies that make it easier to use out of the box, like MicroG and a pretty well put together store. It’s no Google Play store, but it’s a step above Aurora Store, which is pretty decent.

With a working /e/ OS (customized to my liking with a different launcher than the stock Bliss launcher), I put in my SIM. No connection. I’m not sure why, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get a data connection. I rebooted, reseated the SIM; I could not get wireless data to this phone. One thing in particular that I tried was to find the Google Fi APK online (it wasn’t in the default Apps store), but immediately realized I couldn’t install it when the only release Google has is for ARM64. The Galaxy S5 is ARMh, or 32-bit ARM.

So I gave up. I ended up turning it into a smart remote for my HTPC running Kodi with the bonus that it can also control my TV and soundbar with the IR transmitter.