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Android/Linux Dual Boot

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Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#131

Post by ryandrake »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #122
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My first encounter with "sideloading" I think was loading up a MP3 player with music, for some reason that was called "sideloading" by some people. In that case, "sideloading" was just transferring basically, nothing about installing. Probably influenced by the original iPod, which really wanted you to sync your iPod with your iTunes library (conveniently directing you to purchase all of your music from Apple's pla…

Well actually.. Steve Jobs himself said in his famous “Thoughts on Music” letter that was posted on the Apple home page that less than 10% of users music on iPods were bought from iTunes. > Probably influenced by the original iPod, which really wanted you to sync your iPod with your iTunes library (conveniently directing you to purchase all of your music from Apple's platform). iTunes (the software) came out before t…

Even before the iTunes store appeared, I always hated the over-complicated import/sync pattern.

1. "Import" your files into iTunes "library"

2. "Sync" that library with a device

My computer already has a filesystem. Why do I need to involve some application's "library"? I hate applications that insist on grafting its own "library" container on top of my already-working filesystem. My OS already allows me to copy files. Why do I need to rely on that application to copy files? Just expose the thing as a mass storage device and let me use my OS!

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#132

Post by hollerith »

m4rtink wrote: post #101
charcircuit wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in regards to the security model, it is decades out of date. For example any app can listen to your microphone and spy on you at anytime. Programs can act as ransomeware or destroy all of your files. Stealers can steal your login credentials and access tokens for all your sites including banking ones.

Well, isn't the idea that you use apps compiled from source by distro maintainers, which are separate from the upstream maintainers ? Frankly, I still trust this model much more than black box Android apps automatically updating in the background, sending tons of telemetry and demanding random permissions so they can spy on you. Not to mention the security model preventing many useful things from working properly (tr…

>isn't the idea that you use apps compiled from source by distro maintainers

That might work if the main danger was upstream maintainers with bad intentions. But the main danger is security holes that no upstream or distro maintainer knows about, which allow attacks by parties that are not open-source maintainers.

Big picture is that GrapheneOS is much, much more secure than PostmarketOS.

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#133

Post by seba_dos1 »

charcircuit wrote: post #129
seba_dos1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...except in virtually any case where you'd run something untrusted there you'd use Flatpak or something similar where what you wrote doesn't apply.

>where what you wrote doesn't apply You can configure your flatpak app so that it will have permission to read microphone in the background or have full access to the disk. Many flatpaks of real apps request dangerous permissions that users have been conditioned to ignore. For example Blender is such an app which has full disk access and background microphone access, and I'm sure many people have installed that. This…

...and if you want an Android app to actually be able to do something useful, you give it root permissions and completely bypass the permission model.

The world isn't black and white. Most reasons why Android apps are being so heavily locked down don't apply to Blender. As a user, I'm not interested in Android-bis - if I were, I would just use Android after all. Nevertheless, things like Flatpak give me, the user, the power over application's permissions and I can take them away (or give more) in a few taps at will. The defaults being tuned for different use cases and threat models are not "being decades out of date", especially when you could already use the existing tooling to replicate other models - regardless of whether you happen to like these defaults or whether they fit your specific use case.

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#134

Post by oneshtein »

jstanley wrote: post #123
Ghoelian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recognise the 5g battery life issues personally. I do 100% agree the GPS thing is such a bad decision. It just becomes noise that no one pays attention to anymore. I ended up using my public ip address in combination with a list of known ips for home and work and such, and building my HA automations around that. I wanted to do it with wifi SSID's, but that also requires the location permission and triggers th…

> I do 100% agree the GPS thing is such a bad decision. It just becomes noise that no one pays attention to anymore. It's not noise for me, I only ever have GPS on for Google Maps, and I like the indicator because its absence reassures me that nothing is using GPS in the background.

I also want to have audible notification or, even better, a loud siren when GPS, or WiFi are activated without my direct action. Sadly, SafeDot doesn't work properly on Graphene.

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#135

Post by gwbas1c »

toastal wrote: post #103
gwbas1c wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I picked up an Xperia I had an Xperia for awhile. I liked it while it was new, but after a year the back started peeling off. Pretty lousy for a phone that was supposed to be waterproof. At that point I realized that the Japanese change out their phones every 6-12 months, thus Sony didn't realize that the market demands much longer reliability in a smartphone.

They do a good job contributing upstream to the kernel & are one of the few phones out there that still allow users to unlock the bootloader & they support headphone jacks + microSD cards.

Honestly, if mine didn't fall apart after reasonable use, I'd probably still be an Xperia user today.

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#136

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ryandrake wrote: post #131
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well actually.. Steve Jobs himself said in his famous “Thoughts on Music” letter that was posted on the Apple home page that less than 10% of users music on iPods were bought from iTunes. > Probably influenced by the original iPod, which really wanted you to sync your iPod with your iTunes library (conveniently directing you to purchase all of your music from Apple's platform). iTunes (the software) came out before t…

Even before the iTunes store appeared, I always hated the over-complicated import/sync pattern. 1. "Import" your files into iTunes "library" 2. "Sync" that library with a device My computer already has a filesystem. Why do I need to involve some application's "library"? I hate applications that insist on grafting its own "library" container on top of my already-working filesystem. My OS already allows me to copy file…

Because with iTunes, I could and did have regular playlists and smart playlists using conditions like ratings, last played, play count, number of times skipped (so that it would automatically be removed from a playlist if I continued to skip a song on my iPod or computer), genre, year released, etc.

You couldn’t have that metadata with just file syncing. Later when iTunes was introduced, it had to support DRM.

Later it also had podcast syncing.

I used iTunes to burn CDs before I had an iPod.

And don’t forget that Jobs being able to negotiate users being able to buy music on iTunes with DRM [1] and letting users burn them to a DRM free CD was so revolutionary that even Bill Gates was impressed.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/09/unearthed-email-shows-bill-ga...

[1] later Jobs argued in the same “Thoughts on Music” letter that instead of Apple licensing its DRM the record label should license DRM free music to everyone since most music was already sold as DRM free CDs and then everyone’s music could work anywhere. Only one record label took them up on the offer from day one. It wasn’t until 2009 that all of the record labels agreed.

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#137

Post by dlcarrier »

ianso wrote: post #102

I think this stuff is super important, simply because there is a ton of stuff we can't do using our phones today. Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware. That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing coul…

Twenty years ago, if you told me that by today we'd have smart phones with eight or more cores, each outperforming an average desktop computer of the time, with capacitive OLED touch screens, on a cellular network with hundreds of megabits of bandwidth, I'd find it believable, because that's where technology was headed at the time.

If you said that they'd effectively all be running either a port of OS X or a Linux distribution with a non-GNU but open source userspace, I'd consider that a somewhat unexpected success of open-source software. I would not at all expect that it would be as locked down as video game console.

The more time passes, the less I use my phone for, and the more likely I am to whip out my laptop to accomplish something, like it's 2005.

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#138

Post by d3Xt3r »

sschueller wrote: post #114
hexagonwin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the N900, Maemo Leste https://maemo-leste.github.io/ > would be a good choice, if not even better.

Nice, I still have my N900 but my provider here (Swisscom Switzerland) is killing 3G by the end of the year...

I wonder if there's some sort of GSM hotspot device where it connects to 4G/5G networks, but creates a small localised 2G/3G cell for older phones. Kind of like how we have mobile hotspot devices, but instead of (or addition to) creating a WiF hotspot, they provide 2G/3G...

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#139

Post by ianso »

ysnp wrote: post #127
ianso wrote: post #102

I think this stuff is super important, simply because there is a ton of stuff we can't do using our phones today. Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware. That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing coul…

>Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. (if dumbed down) What's are the gaps in features and functionality between what you're describing and what might be achievable today (given enough software glue) with an SDR transceiver and something like Reticulum [1] on an Android?

Very good question!

SDR + something like Reticulum or Yggdrasil would definitely provide the infra or network fabric for the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

However, a normal Android, e.g. a Pixel 7, can't to my knowledge be turned into a web server or a podman host for containers. (I know of people hosting websites on old Androids that are flashed or hacked).

Given phones already have a WiFi/WLAN radio chip, it's a shame to need extra kit for connectivity.

It's something that's been on my mind a lot recently and so you provoked me into writing down a series of scenarios in story format that illustrates what SHOULD be possible using current hardware, were it not, as dlcarrier says, locked down like a games console.

Here you go:

https://ianso.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-we-dont-have.html

Re: Android/Linux Dual Boot

#140

Post by cenamus »

dlcarrier wrote: post #137
ianso wrote: post #102

I think this stuff is super important, simply because there is a ton of stuff we can't do using our phones today. Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware. That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing coul…

Twenty years ago, if you told me that by today we'd have smart phones with eight or more cores, each outperforming an average desktop computer of the time, with capacitive OLED touch screens, on a cellular network with hundreds of megabits of bandwidth, I'd find it believable, because that's where technology was headed at the time. If you said that they'd effectively all be running either a port of OS X or a Linux di…

Open source userspace? Google Play Sevices?
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