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Termux and Android 10

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Re: Termux and Android 10

#71

Post by AshamedCaptain »

anotheryou wrote: post #49

Could this be forked out by LineageOS?

This is one of the reasons that "open source" by itself is not enough for "user liberation" as it is usually painted.

What point there is to forking a platform where the upstream is as big as a mammoth as Google, changing millions of lines per release and actively breaking API compatibility?

Your fork will stay stuck in an API version that in a couple years will have almost no programs written for it. Who would use that?

Your only choice is to try to match the manpower from Google and try to keep your "fork" up-to-date. But that is also guaranteed to eventually fail as someday Google will change something that you literally _lack_ the manpower to revert.

Which is why I can't recommend an "open source" _Android_ phone. I don't feel promoting Android at all, even if open source, encourages my user freedom.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#73

Post by swiley »

larrik wrote: post #43
pathartl wrote: post #4

I'm really starting to despise most OS's for having such an overbearing security policy. I think it's really why I've stuck with Windows for so long. For sure Windows is not as user-stupid as something like macOS, iOS, Android, etc... but for me as a power user it's just about as powerful as I need to be. I'm not even considering *nix distros here because honestly the market for every day users for something like Ubu…

As someone who has been on Linux a long time, but still has to support family members using Windows, here's my perspective: 1) Linux is usually easier in the "happy case", where everything works as it should, and it supports everything that the user needs. 2) Linux is way way way less likely to just change something and break the whole system while the user is sleeping. (This was REAL fun with my grandparents-in-law…

>It's way easier to find someone you know to help you on Windows than Linux, for now.

Really? Windows seems to be losing developer mindshare pretty fast and I’m not convinced this isn’t already the case. In college the capture the flag group had a serious problem finding people familiar with windows development and most junior software engineers I’ve met are much more familiar with GNU/Linux than windows.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#75

Post by swiley »

hyperpallium wrote: post #60

nvm

Android is horribly buggy even on good phones, people used to tolerate it because it was cheap and let people do things they needed.

Now android is just buggy (and literally unsexy) There’s no reason at all to use it.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#76

Post by kagenouta »

zozbot234 wrote: post #58
AsyncAwait wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only "real" solution is to get an actual Linux phone, such as the PinePhone[1] or Librem 5[2]. 1 - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone 2 - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

Linux phones are nice since they provide things like mainline kernel support which is important for the long term, but many cheap Android devices can be modded to run custom firmware. (The PostmarketOS is working on providing "baseline" Linux installs for those devices.)

Also worth noting that one of Google's long-term goals is to make Android bootable on mainline. They've been slowly upstreaming the patches they built into Android's base kernel, and their Treble roadmap involves further isolating the hardware drivers, to enable running a generic kernel across devices.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#77

Post by mjg59 »

esotericn wrote: post #67

I ordered a PinePhone the other day and I'm going to do as much as I can to try and make it my daily driver. I really can't be arsed with this stuff any more. Why are the developers at Google acting in such boneheaded ways? Is it literally just "I get paid loads of money, lol"? Do people not grow out of that eventually when they have enough? Like, you're literally a developer. Why would you make something you wouldn'…

> Why are the developers at Google acting in such boneheaded ways?

(I'm a developer at Google, but I'm not on the Android team and am definitely not providing any sort of official response here - this is personal opinion and may be inaccurate)

If apps can download arbitrary code and then execute it, they can bypass the validation that's done as part of the Play Protect program. My understanding is that there's plenty of evidence of malware in the wild that presents as a harmless app and then downloads the actual payload after being installed on the user's device.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#78

Post by draw_down »

esotericn wrote: post #67

I ordered a PinePhone the other day and I'm going to do as much as I can to try and make it my daily driver. I really can't be arsed with this stuff any more. Why are the developers at Google acting in such boneheaded ways? Is it literally just "I get paid loads of money, lol"? Do people not grow out of that eventually when they have enough? Like, you're literally a developer. Why would you make something you wouldn'…

> Why are the developers at Google acting in such boneheaded ways? Is it literally just "I get paid loads of money, lol"?

Come on. You’re not even making sense in your own terms.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#79

Post by Dylan16807 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #69
Dylan16807 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty high standard. You don't need to open it up for developer mode, which lets you mess around as root, chroot into a Linux distro, give the chroot control of the screen...

"Developer mode" is incredibly brittle. If you don't press the right key combination at boot, your user partitions get formatted without warning and you lose all data. That makes it essentially a toy, not a real "developer" device.

I see your point, but it's not as bad as that. Pressing the right key combination is optional, and all it does is skip an annoying beep. Factory reset isn't triggered by inactivity, it's triggered by pressing space and then confirming.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#80

Post by CameronNemo »

KenoFischer wrote: post #37

What's the actual restriction? If it's literally just exec on apps outside the app directory, why not shim the dynamic linker and rewrite calls to exec to use that instead? Are there additional W^X protections that prevent mapping executables outside the app directory PROT_EXEC? (Note I have no idea how Android works so I may be missing something very basic).

From what I can tell, the W^X restriction is via SELinux, which is a kernel level mechanism that cannot be circumvented with LD_PRELOAD games.
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