>How about the Pine phones, or any other phone with Linux instead of the proprietary spying OSes on them? I'm still on Symbian exactly for that reason - my Nokia E5 is ten years old - but the number of things which I can't do because I don't have a compatible phone is slowly growing. Nobody here seems to even know that such things exist,

My E51 is older and on 4th battery change - new replacement was not really solid. Since the last 2 years used as backup/date/sports phone (small, nothing distracting). Now I am getting plastered with notices 3G will be turned off and wonder if I should buy another battery.

Nowadays even cheap phones come with a battery you cannot change - which means you can never be certain the phone is REALLY turned off.

>and most of the instructional videos that I find are not about removing Android from a phone, but rather about running Linux as an app under Android - which is not the goal.

Hmmm, trouble is that even other OS will try to run android apps and those will have ears inside their layers. I am not certain a Linux OS will be much better than Lineage or other AOPK fork.