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Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

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Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#121

Post by rtpg »

wpwpwpw wrote: post #52

There's this years long quest to keep old phones alive, which is amazing (i'm myself using lineageos). But what are the odds of doing the crazy stuff people at asahi are doing with mX macs? There are absolutely no drivers for that hardware, and they are building everything from the ground up. Of course it's a huge amount of work given the considerable amount of different chipsets, cameras... but am I dumb to believe…

So for phone stuff there's a lot of things going on, but for repurposing CPUs for other stuff... my understanding is that none of these phones are actually really capable of running consistently and basically just burn up and break if you try to put serious consistent load on them.

I mean it makes sense in a way, but all of this stuff seems to be built for very bursty behavior

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#122

Post by e-clinton »

ksidudwbw wrote: post #97
jkepler wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, exactly. I have two ancient Nokia N900s that came out in 2009, runs a Debian variant natively and there's the Maemo Leste project that brings mainline Linux to the device (amazing!). However, is already useless as a phone in the USA. I also hear rumors European carriers will shutter their 3G networks soon; which is a shame. The hardware, while old and slow due to memory constraints, still works . I guess I shou…

These days you can make a huge damning report of how eco-unfriendly they are for doing this. However we have been sucked into

Don’t worry, not including a charger in the box will make up for it /s

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#123

Post by int_19h »

bluepuma77 wrote: post #100
strenholme wrote: post #37

The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates. The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phon…

Not sure if smartphones will last 10 years. I have 2 early Google phones die on me with strange boot loops (different series), my trusted hardware guy says the flash died. They are just not made for 10 years usage. Your laptop may be good, but it will probably only support some ancient insecure slow WiFi profiles. Distributions start to drop old hardware. And there are always new CPU and other chip security bugs disc…

802.11g will be 20 years old in a few months - that's up to 54 Mbps, which is plenty for most things short of streaming video. Similarly, 802.11n (up to 600 Mbps) is almost 15 years old.

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#124

Post by karteum »

strenholme wrote: post #37

The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates. The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phon…

> The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates

5 years of updates is still a short time. We only have one planet...

> The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phone itself be able to make calls on whatever cellular networks exist 10 years from now?

I don't think this is the biggest issue : operators usually maintain a certain type of carrier for at least 20-30 years (in France, we are only talking about shutting down 2G - which still raises a lot of issue because of the many IoT devices using GSM...)

The biggest issues are IMO

  - lack of parts to repair old phones
  - no possibility to manage bootloader keys / relock the bootloader (not even mentioning devices with locked bootloaders)
  - "stable-api-nonsense" ideology and no BIOS/UEFI/ACPI for smartphone => no way to have "one firmware to rule them all"

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#125

Post by my123 »

karteum wrote: post #124
strenholme wrote: post #37

The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates. The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phon…

> The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates 5 years of updates is still a short time. We only have one planet... > The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS…

Qualcomm Android phones use UEFI since the Snapdragon 835.

With an Android bootloader UEFI app on top to mimic what Android wants on top...

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#126

Post by rekoil »

my123 wrote: post #125
karteum wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates 5 years of updates is still a short time. We only have one planet... > The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS…

Qualcomm Android phones use UEFI since the Snapdragon 835. With an Android bootloader UEFI app on top to mimic what Android wants on top...

Wow, I didn't know that, that's actually really good!

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#127

Post by rekoil »

izacus wrote: post #118
kkielhofner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m really confused by this - my iPhone 6 from 2014 has 4G LTE (and still gets security updates). What were you buying in 2018 that was 3G!?

The US telcos went back to whitelisting phone models for volte, so unless you bought phone that were sold by them they'll prevent your from making calls (and accessing 5G network too).

Is the VoLTE implementation actually substantially different from device to device?

What's the reasoning behind doing this?

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#128

Post by nix23 »

reyqn wrote: post #102
culopatin wrote: post #90

I went to the site and failed to understand what’s different from other Android distros to make the general claim of “support for EOL Android devices”. Isn’t it the same as LineageOS or whatever other distros you can find for each device at XDA? I thought I was going to find a site that found a way of running newer Android over the old one to not have to worry about drivers and such, but I found yet another distro wi…

Yeah I was checking what support they advertised for my old nexus 5 and the recently retired oneplus X of my girlfriend. The nexus 5 is on 9.0, mostly working, the oneplus X isn't supported at all. That's not long-term support.

>The nexus 5 is on 9.0

Here it works ~perfectly...with one problem, i could not connect to a hidden wlan, but absolutely great job from DivestOS, thanks!!

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#129

Post by nix23 »

_rdvw wrote: post #78
stratosmacker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't bother with the naysayers and dickheads. I appreciate you trying to do something here for old devices, and 80% solutions are ok for most of us. (I suppose postmarketOS is similar in spirit) Does building a GSI make sense to cover more devices? Or would that not make sense in this context?

Two of the benefits of DivestOS, the kernel patching/hardening and the vendor blob removal, are not compatible with GSIs as a GSI includes neither the boot or vendor partition.

Hey, just thank you very much for revitalizing my Nexus 5, it's a usable device again ;)

Great Job and project, thanks again!

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#130

Post by wetpaws »

rekoil wrote: post #127
izacus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US telcos went back to whitelisting phone models for volte, so unless you bought phone that were sold by them they'll prevent your from making calls (and accessing 5G network too).

Is the VoLTE implementation actually substantially different from device to device? What's the reasoning behind doing this?

They do it because they can.
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