[AT&T Samsung Galaxy S 4 General] MrSimmonsSr:
A few quick questions before I start trying this..

Hello, everyone. Before I start, let me give a big thanks to everyone involved in this thread, and especially to ted77usa, for all of the hard work and deep thought that has gone into this thread. I really appreciate everyone's efforts. I've been reading through this thread now for a while and there is SO MUCH valuable info that everyone has contributed. I really appreciate all your efforts.

That said, I have a couple questions and I'm hoping one of you kind souls will help me get my bearings here a bit before I dive in too quickly and break something. I'm familiar with rooting, with installing custom recoveries, and also with loading up custom ROMs on my device. I have been using linux regularly since about 93 or 94, so I know my way around a command line a bit, as well. I am far from an Android guru though, but I do like to tinker.

So here is my situation. I currently own a couple Android tablets that I have custom ROMs on and my phone is a Galaxy S3. My company pays for my phone and they use Mobile Iron to make sure my email and calendar are working with a level of security that they feel good about. For that reason there are limitations as to how much I can muck with my phone. I did root the S3 I have now, but only to get rid of all of the Samsung and AT&T bloatware (including KNOX) and to hack it a bit to kill the AT&T provisioning check for the wifi tethering capability. Once I had that done, I un-rooted it and was able to use Mobile Iron with no problems, and my phone was much faster than default because I'd gotten rid of the bloatware.

My new Galaxy S4 (AT&T) should be here tomorrow and I'd like to do the same thing with it. I'm assuming it will likely be running the NB1 build, based on what I've read here. After reading all of this thread I realized I might have screwed up by getting a Galaxy S4 from AT&T because of the locked bootloader, but what is done is done and I don't think I can change that now. It sounds like that little gem just makes everything a bit more difficult. The last thing I want to do is brick the phone my company is paying for and cost my boss money, so I'm trying to take it slow and make sure I don't do anything stupid. Since my use case is a bit different from many folks here who want to load custom ROMs, I thought I would just ask if this approach is really the only one for me to use to root my new S4, remove a bunch of the useless crap that comes on it? I would also like to enable free tethering. I am still on one of the old unlimited data plans from AT&T, so they won't let me add the tethering option to my account without killing my unlimited data. With my Galaxy S3 I was able to root it and load a hacked version of one of the system files that basically had some stuff commented out in an XML file and that caused my S3 to stop trying to check with AT&T to see if it was OK to allow tethering on the device.

What is my quickest, least risky approach to a similar task on the S4? Anyone have any thoughts they'd like to share. I really would appreciate any input that you would like to give. All I want to do is root, uninstall a bunch of apps, hack the tethering, and then unroot it and keep it as close to stock as possible. The fact that this rooting approach includes downgrading to parts of a previous build and such made me a bit nervous that maybe it wasn't the proper approach for me to take since I'm trying to end up as close to stock as possible, without all the bloat.

So what do you guys think? Any advice or guidance that anyone would care to share with me before my new Galaxy S4 gets here tomorrow and I dive in?