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Termux and Android 10

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Re: Termux and Android 10

#151

Post by larrik »

neilalexander wrote: post #142
larrik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Linux is way way way less likely to just change something and break the whole system while the user is sleeping I take it you have never had to try and correct a system broken by seemingly innocent-looking aptitude or RPM package upgrades. :-) > Fixing a Windows problem can involve having to go into the registry, which can't be copy/pasted and is extremely difficult AND dangerous. (There probably IS a way to copy/p…

> I take it you have never had to try and correct a system broken by seemingly innocent-looking aptitude or RPM package upgrades. :-)

Keep in mind that on Win10 you don't even have to click a button, and the updates aren't even avoidable.

> I’m really not sure the registry is any more “dangerous”. For many everyday users, I would guess that the perceived complexity of the registry and of configuration files scattered throughout the system are really about the same. Both can appear cryptic and fragile.

I dunno, once they are in the registry, it's like putting every config file on the whole system into their home/documents directory...

Re: Termux and Android 10

#152

Post by freedomben »

freedomben wrote: post #127
haecceity wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to send sms from cli? Using the on screen keyboard with quotes and escaping special characters and all?

Thanks for asking. My use case is programmatic. I wrote a couple of ruby and bash scripts that automate a few different things. One is a poor-mans SMS scheduler that allows me to have it fire off at a set time. Another parses incoming messages and alert me differently based on content (matches against a set of regexes), and in some cases will auto-reply. Another, I had a case where I need to individually send out the…

It looks like the comment requesting a link to the fork was deleted.

I haven't kept the fork up to date with the latest patches as I haven't need anything yet, but it's here: https://github.com/FreedomBen/termux-api

You have to both `termux` the app and `termux-api` to get SMS functionality. I build both at the same version so there aren't any compatibility issues. Then make sure you don't have automatic updates turned on otherwise the Play store will "update" you to a non-sideloaded one that does not have the SMS ability.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#153

Post by ocdtrekkie »

djsumdog wrote: post #94
zozbot234 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I am a big fan of PostmarketOS, but that being said, you still need to patch the Mesa libraries to get hardware acceleration working on an old Nexus 7. They want to do a lot more work, but it's difficult with all these garbage/trash ARM devices out there. If Google gave a shit about e-waste, they'd mandate UEFI+ARM like Microsoft did with their phones (except without the locked bootloader). Trying to get drivers to l…

I am still surprised Google gets almost no flack for this. Chromebooks are particularly bad offenders. They're basically disposable laptops with an incredibly short lifecycle, where even browser security updates end when Google decides a laptop has left support. It's ironic Chrome is supported many years longer on any given Windows PC than any given Chromebook.

Google loves claiming to be environmentally friendly, but disposable computing is practically their default mode now.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#154

Post by capdeck »

ufmace wrote: post #11

I installed Termux on my Chromebook a few years ago to try and create a local development environment per this article[0]. It seemed to work okay, but I never liked how janky and unsupported the whole thing felt. I couldn't bring myself to try and build a workflow around it long-term. And here I guess that's vindicated. Whether now or in a few years, the whole concept of Termux is not long for this world. I guess the…

> to keep insecure and abusive apps off of the majority of users' devices.

I don't know, but we have a small android tablet with a bunch of games. If you ask me - Play Store is a cesspool of ad-ware ridden junk with some of the games showing you an ad after every single screen (5-10 clicks / taps). After installing more than 10 games the tablet starts showing full screen adds spontaneously at different times and in different screens. And I haven't installed any "shady" apps, just games with "4 stars" or more rating on them.

Somehow that is ok, but running GNU grep in a terminal is now a crime on Android. And you can review grep's code, while these games run amok with spyware.

Google is "fixing" security in all the wrong places. Which means security has nothing to do with what Google does. It is locking the android appliance to ensure uninterrupted consumption of ads. Anything else, be that development, tinkering, etc. which interferes with ad consumption must be restricted, limited and removed.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#155

Post by anderspitman »

Disclaimer: I'm not really an Android developer. I was considering implementing a service I'm working on for Android and after many hours of research determined it's not a suitable operating system for my purposes.

Personally I no longer consider Android a viable computing platform. As a developer you simply don't have the tools available to give your users control over their data and experience. With the changes to storage security the last couple years, they've essentially dumbed it down to the level of a web browser, and in the process pretty much deprecated running native (C, C++, Rust, Golang, etc) applications.

I'm not opposed to improving security, but when you can't even run software like syncthing or a file explorer without getting special Play store approval, something is wrong.

I've been meaning to write a blog post summarizing what I learned.

This official video is actually a pretty good summary of some the changes made and what the goal is:

https://youtu.be/UnJ3amzJM94

Re: Termux and Android 10

#156

Post by pathartl »

robertoandred wrote: post #134
pathartl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, see, now that's good. I don't use macOS enough so I've not known about that. > It'd be nice if Apple had functionality to easily have your own root signing setup alongside theirs, so that we could take advantage of all the signing mojo as well. Yeah, that would be very developer friendly without breaking their shields too much. Also no argument that macOS isn't modifiable. However with the general dismantlement o…

You don't use it enough, and yet you felt qualified to criticize something you clearly knew nothing about.

Most of my time on it these days is supporting others, or using my aging 2014 MBA. What I remember is I started to get more locked down with each update. Personally I would prefer an "expert" mode in preferences or something of the sort.

But yeah, I made a rash judgement on something I don't often use. I owned up to it.

Anyway, for what it's worth the only reference to that command online is from Apple discussion boards or third party sites. There's no documentation from Apple themselves. For PowerShell, Microsoft has this type of policy well-documented:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

They also link to this documentation directly within the error message: https://adsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PowerShell...

Re: Termux and Android 10

#157

Post by freedomben »

on_and_off wrote: post #146
freedomben wrote: post #119

As a heavy Termux user and one who describes Termux as "the killer app for Android" this makes me sad and angry. I was very irritated when they broke ability to send SMS from the termux CLI (in fact I forked and currently build my own version with that patch reverted). If I wanted a paternalistic platform I would be an iOS user (I don't mean that as a slam, iOS obviously has its place, but it's not for me).

This change was a long time coming and looking at that issue thread just makes me sad. It does not look like they contacted the platform team or even tried to come up with any solution. They had one year before the change was included in Android. And then another year before 29 became the mandatory version to support to publish on the play store.

Yeah the way the Termux team handled this was really frustrating too. They just yanked out the code and had it return an unhelpful error message.

I would have much preferred they release a "play store" version and then a full version to F-Droid or something.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#158

Post by pmlnr »

app4soft wrote: post #123

Android 5/6 support dropped by Termux devs this year. Android 10 is killing Termux terminal app. Hope, Termux devs would now drop back support for Android 5/6.

That part hurt me. One of the points of things like Termux is to make use of old devices, so killing support really isn't helping.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#159

Post by mdoms »

jdmg94 wrote: post #8
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…

> 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 guess it depends on what kind of "power user" you are because windows is pretty limited (why else would they frankestein an Ubuntu terminal into the latest Windows versions?).

> (why else would they frankestein an Ubuntu terminal into the latest Windows versions?

Certainly not to help you administer your Windows system, which is not at all what it is intended for.

Re: Termux and Android 10

#160

Post by hsitz »

MereInterest wrote: post #141
AgloeDreams wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be ChromeOS tablets. Full linux terminal in container and all. Hasn't really made any difference.

About once every 2-3 months, something would be changed in ChromeOS that would break the crouton installation. The solution could be as simple as updating crouton, only 15-30 minutes of lost time, to switching to/from a later development version of ChromeOS, 3-4 hours of lost time as the entire hard drive is wiped and you need to rebuild the environment. The use of a Linux environment in ChromeOS should only be viewe…

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Crouton is different from Crostini, and it's Crostini that is the default/built-in Linux container on Chromeos (on a Pixelbook). I've been using Crostini on Chromeos since November 2018 and I've never had "the hard drive wiped" or had to rebuild the environment. I'm trying hard to recall anything that's actually been a bug. I'm sure there've been some. Mostly they've been rolling out increased features on a pretty regular basis, with few hiccups. It's not a great solution for everything, but, to me, it's been surprisingly robust and useful.

It certainly is not "a toy". The Pixelbook is a beautiful piece of hardware, but I wouldn't be using it (at least not as a contented Chromeos user) if it didn't have the built-in Linux container.

I do follow Chromeos/Crostini/Pixelbook forums somewhat online. I know I've seen some people griping about problems caused by updates. From what I can tell, a very large percent of these people are ones who were using Chromeos/Crostini with the 'dev' or 'beta' branch, so they could get new features on their device sooner. I've been on 'Stable' and have had few complaints.

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