[Magisk] dr4go:
First of all: no, not from Hans Zimmer, but you may hear the beautiful Inception song as well while reading this... or don't...

Secondly: no I don't need help - so in case you don't have time / don't want to read my story, just don't. You won't be richer afterwards anyway. :')

And thirdly: God, this post won't be easy to write as I'm already sure, that it is going to be longer than imagined, to short because I have missed so much and also forgot to mention a few names, because there are too many names out there from people, who I do admire, are inspirations at&to the core and are really geniuses in their area. And I decided not to use any tags, because it would be just too many... and also to few... And I decided as well not to search for exact names, I'm sorry if I misspelled yours / remembered it incorrectly, I'll try my best.

- I have already said / mentioned it a couple of times that I'm going to stop rooting my next device, which has now arrived and is waiting in its box until the next days... it was real fun with my beloved stolen HTC Desire HD, where the world was still in its shape, XDA was less commercial and you could simply root your phone by using Chainfire's SuperSU - god I miss those days, I really do. Thank you also mike1986.

- After that came my horrible and second more intense endeavor with the LG Optimus 2X, which hurt my relationship with nVidia (yes, it was written like that years ago when I liked it and I still refuse to adapt to the new name) so so much and caused a couple of explosions from myself and as well my girlfriend's, because my phone refuse to ring when being called due to an incompatible RIL. Thank you pengus77 and also Ricardo Cerqueira for the glorious CyanogenMod.

- Things were quite smooth with all of my Xperia phones (Z1 Compact, Z5 Compact and X Performance), because if you knew them you could a) really use them rooted, were b) quite compact and c) you could also restore them fully to stock after they were rooted. So the situation was still ok, but you needed to unlock them after you saved the internal TA image partition, because Sony decided to permanently wipe it once you unlock the bootloader causing a crippled phone, because of missing drm keys. Thanks j4nn, doomlord, devshaft, IgorEisberg, tobias waldvogel, serajr, osm0sis, munjeni, Androxyde (in no particular order) for the experience. And I hate(d) Sony for that, i.e. that you need to a) find a security hole in the OS to be able to store your drm keys, b) they crippled all media on the phone (yes, this includes the camera as well, sadly). Sadly it became impossible to find a new competitive phone from the brand with an already known security hole.

- This story leads now down to the rabbit hole and my current phone: Samsung Galaxy S10. I _never ever_ thought that I'd buy a Samsung device as I usually am more of an underdog brand guy... but as it was more and more difficult to find a device with a) a good camera and b) a micro sd card I decided to expose myself to the Samsung world (side note: I never had a Nokia back then for example as well). That you also (permanently) cripple your phone due to Knox and cause bluetooth connections to be lost on reboot, wearables not to work, broken secure folder, etc. I didn't know, which made me sad - but at least they don't cripple the experience too much like Sony does... i.e. no deal-breaker... still it was a) on one hand a more pleasant experience than expected (god I even tried to stay with Samsung on the next phone), b) my first non-compact phone (with the intention to kill this criteria as well with the next phone) and c) still a phone with a micro sd card. Boy... (or / and girl...) d) rooted.

I needed root because d1) I always used an adblocker (thanks PerfectSlayer for AdAway), d2) used vpn since the x performance (not critical for d2 so far), and always used d3) betterbatterystats (thanks chamonix) + greenify (thanks oasisfeng) + (EdX|LS|X)posed (thanks rovo89, mlgmxyysd, whole LSposed team) which was one big reason to root (and finally became obsolete since Android 10+, because of Google's better deep sleep implementation), d4) backups (thanks to both the whole CWM, TWRP and TitaniumBackup teams) and d5) (also since the x performance) XPrivacy(Lua) (thanks M66B).

Finally we're on point when needed to migrate from SuperSU with SudoHide (or similar) to Magisk (thanks so much to topjohnwu for his efforts: 1) for the idea of Magisk... Google started to cause so much troubles, 2) for the Galaxy S10 procedures specifically -> what a horrible phone this is to root... due to no initramfs in the boot partition you need to either root the phone's (i.e. put Magisk into) kernel (never did that personally) or the recovery. I also wanted to spice up the security a bit, which led to the usage of an encrypted data partition by giving up twrp - bad bad decision, because that's when I had my only bootloop with an encrypted data partition and no way to recover from it, because I accidentally flashed an incomplete image, which shrank my data partition and every attempt to restore from that failed... I didnt bother too much, because I had set up TitaniumBackup and set my phone's camera to the external sd card. That's also exactly when I've realized that Titanium Backup is mostly broken on newer Android versions and my other backups were 3 months old... additionally I had lost the photos of a very cool holiday, because I borrowed my sd card to a friend and as I put it back in so that my girlfriend could take some photos during this trip, she didn't know to set the storage to the external card... I wasn't close by and she forgot to tell. That's how it is with backups: I needed them once all those years (obviously I also flashed, restored apps, etc., but that was all planned) and that's exactly when they don't work. Long story short: now we need people like (topjohnwu, osm0sis, ) byxiaorun, displax, huskydg, the whole Riru team (thanks Rikka and also all the other guys I have missed), didgeridoohan, BostonDan and also summarizers (like pndwal or zgfg to be able to keep up with everything, no disrespect intended [for calling you summarizers]!) to still have a working phone. Specific to the S10: thanks to 3arthur6, pickles, Ianmacd, dr.ketan.

And to be honest: I'm tired of having to write debloat scripts by my own just because I don't want to unencrypt the data partition. Change hex patches with every new major one ui update. copy images back and forth to phone to be able to root them, copy them back to the pc to finally flash them. crossing my fingers for every operation that works when I know that my backup was already long overdue since the last time. Oh I forgot: create my own riru and magisk forks for better hiding purposes when I'm a father of two children with a wife at home. Srsly... enough is enough... so I decided already approx. a year ago to stop rooting phones (screw google for the upcoming TEE enforcement!) and combined d1 and d2 to a vpn solution with ad blocking, stopped d3 alltogether, d4 wasn't working when I needed it most and d5 had to be sacrified... still unsure if my road continues now with Netguard (again: thank you M66B), AdAway or a different VPN solution - we'll see about that as well (and screw google a second time for not being able to use two VPNs at the same time). And screw (most of) all the manufacturers as well for giving up the microsd card slot... it shouldn't be that hard to get a phone with a microsd card slot and a very good camera. Sure there is Huawei (without Google Services, no thanks) or Xiaomi (at least some phones... without root I'm not sure if I would put my trust into this company with their stock firmware as a non-chinese resident) or Sony... where you can't use the camera / make videos for more than a couple of minutes, because they overheat... and that on a ~1400 USD phone. My ass... (sorry for the language). And to sacrifice the microsd slot was once again a tough decision, let's see if it's the right one - only time will tell. But to be able to do that, I wanted a phone with 512GB internal memory. This leaves you now with basically a couple of choices only: S22 Ultra (as being mentioned: would have loved it, but I don't want to spend so much on phones), Asus ROG Phone 6(d), Oppo Find X5 Pro or One+ 10 Pro. Let's see how the story continues... yes, you'll still see me around, but I'm not intending to use the XDA app on the phone anymore and won't stop by / react so frequently anymore. It was fun... (also to see pndwal and / or 73sidney joking around)... oh and I forgot to throw a few ponkles to you guys as well), but time to move on... And as everyone sees / hears, I took a different decision than Hippoman with his new Pixel 5 phone (have fun with that!).

Have a nice day / night everybody! And merry christmas + a happy 2023 as well, over and out (in the next couple of days at least)!

dr4go

p.s.: Sorry if I have ofended you / caused you any harm / not mentioned you. Sadly I'm not the youngest anymore and time is more precious than ever these days.