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Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

thefoggiest.dev

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Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#201

Post by gkbrk »

juped wrote: post #200
FredPret wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but with your friends privacy preferences. Network effects and human nature combines to make this a completely insurmountable obstacle. You'll likely never convince even a sizable minority of your own friends & family to do tech things the hard way because you think it's more private that way. That is the argument in favour of being a bit more mainstream - you get to interface with the rest of humanity with much le…

It was the easiest thing of all time to get friends and family onto Signal, actually, before the idiots took SMS out and it became just another confusing messenger app.

No, you don't understand. They need the developer bandwidth and velocity for things like their sketchy cryptocurrency and GIPHY integrations.

They can't waste the time they can use on shitcoins for something like SMS.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#202

Post by margalabargala »

erxam wrote: post #128
mft_ wrote: post #60

But why, indeed. Years ago, I met someone (through another friend) who worked in CS, and was super into digital privacy. He was the first person I knew to run a Linux phone, for privacy reasons. He tried to pay for as much as possible by cash, and maintained his accounts manually on paper. The only way to contact him was by text message (intermittently, unreliably) or via a specific client using the Matrix protocol.…

It is kind of extreme. I personally daily drove the OG Pinephone for about a year-and-a-half, back in 2020. I bought in during the postmarketOS edition. I'm still dealing with the fallout from the choices I made in order to conform with that phone. And at the end of the day... I got nothing out of it. Nothing but issues, problems and inconveniences. The modem eventually stopped working for some reason, and I moved to…

Would you be willing to talk about the fallout you refer to?

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#203

Post by SahAssar »

gehsty wrote: post #145
mft_ wrote: post #60

But why, indeed. Years ago, I met someone (through another friend) who worked in CS, and was super into digital privacy. He was the first person I knew to run a Linux phone, for privacy reasons. He tried to pay for as much as possible by cash, and maintained his accounts manually on paper. The only way to contact him was by text message (intermittently, unreliably) or via a specific client using the Matrix protocol.…

As a layman in terms of security and operating systems, is this actually more secure or private than using iOS in lockdown mode and communicating via iMessage? Feels OTT for anything you might talk about in a personal relationship

A lot of privacy fanatics (myself included) are also open source fanatics. I like to be able to wrap my own tinfoil hat even if it is harder and a bit more uncomfortable.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#204

Post by rendaw »

418tpot wrote: post #132
rahen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are very relevant for a Linux laptop, but much less so for a Linux smartphone. An AOSP-based distro like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or /e/OS paired with Termux provides almost a all of this, with the added benefit of ART - quite possibly the most polished runtime in the Linux ecosystem. You can even plug a bluetooth keyboard and run Emacs on your Android / AOSP phone nowadays.

I currently run LineageOS and am constantly frustrated with its limitations every day. On desktop linux I can quickly write up a program to do most anything I want in pretty much any language, and in my text editor of choice. I don't know anything about android development and I don't really want to invest time in learning Google's proprietary GUI toolkit when QT/GTK, or even raw OpenGL is more portable. I once looke…

I think it's painful to write an app inside android studio, it's just pain you accept if you want to do android development. Professional pain so to speak, you're paid to suffer.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#205

Post by chainingsolid »

brbcompiling wrote: post #88

Anyone tried Linux phones for daily use? Not those Android ones, but real Linux. Just wondering how it works in real life compared to Android/iOS?

I've been reading Hackernews in the morning and call/texting on my Pinephone for a few years now. The polish(and many times functonality) level is far less than Android/iOS. Depending on what you need/want will dictate if you could use it. For example all the Android/iOS only stuff I just ignore. And I haven't yet gotten GPS + maps to work though it seams like quite a bit of that is in place. If you have specific questions I'd be happy to have a go at answering them.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#206

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

netsharc wrote: post #194
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, lack of secure boot is a tradeoff. Of course, by the same token you can just reflash the boot partition and fix that.

How does flashing work, who controls the writes? I remember reading about hacking the controller of an SD card to override the read/write functionality. I think if the bootloader is overwritable, it could lie to you about reflashing the boot partition...

It varies by device. Obviously something has to handle writes, but generally it's a lower stage that isn't easily writable itself.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#207

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

progbits wrote: post #163
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile here I am on my Linux machine, constantly anxious that sooner or later one of my bazillion npm and pip dependencies will get compromised, and secretly praying that one day proper sandboxing and an Android-security model will be common on the Linux desktop, so that I can erect security boundaries between my applications and repositories. Why wait? You can shove your pip/npm uses into docker/podman and remo…

Docker is not a security barrier. There have been plenty of container escape attacks in the past, and plenty more to come. But I agree it might remove the 90%.

No, Linux containers are a security barrier. They're not absolutely 100% impenetrable, but they're pretty good, and I would generally expect them to be fine against the kind of things most people are worried about getting from pip/npm.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#208

Post by moondev »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #193

Privacy of things aside. My phone has more compute & ram than my computer did many years ago. There is no longer a _need_ for a mobile platform like there was years ago. I would love to run any software I want on my phone. Problem is these days, "first to market" mentality ships software with a lot of bloat and it is tolerable bc PCs are very powerful. So as phones got more powerful, software got more bloaty.

I have a pixel 9 pro, in the android beta there is a "terminal" app that launches a Debian shell inside a VM. You can choose to resize the disk as large as your storage can offer, and all apt aarch64 packages are available including docker. Really impressed with it so far. This is a similar experience to crostini on ChromeOS, but gui apps are not working yet.

I was able to ssh out to one my servers, then ssh into the phone from my desktop forwarding x11. I then successfully launched x11-eyes and a few others. Hopeful that eventually you can run a desktop or at least x11/wayland apps all self contained on the phone. Pretty cool to tinker with for now.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#209

Post by JCattheATM »

tholdem wrote: post #180
JCattheATM wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Fedora, being based on Red Hat, has the strongest SELinux policy in place by default, and SELinux is pretty much the best sandboxing option available other than actual virtualization.

Yes, but this was about Silverblue and how it implements some additional sandboxing, which it doesn't. SELinux is great, but maintaining it and creating configs is huge amount of work and where on AOSP, every process is strictly confined with SELinux, on Fedora, not so much. Not to mention the additional software the user installs. Not at all comparable to real Android or iOS sandboxing.

It's generally only initial work to make the policies to maintain a program, maintaining doesn't even really exist unless the program radically changes in some way.

Fedora is notable because any software installed via repositories has a policy written for it, so it is already far more in effect than you might realize.

It's entirely comparable to Android sandboxing because it's part of the foundation of Android sandboxing.

Re: Daily driving a Linux phone, but why?

#210

Post by yencabulator »

Arnavion wrote: post #131
pona-a wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I'm writing this from an Fedora Sericea, which is Silverblue but with Sway instead of GNOME. Atomic Fedoras solve only package hysteresis (your package manager being unable to reproduce the intended system state because of unaccounted for changes) by generating the root file system with OSTree. It has nothing to do with sandboxing the applications themselves.

It does in the sense that all the applications you install will be via flatpak, so they get sandboxed that way. Of course it depends on how locked down the sandbox is configured for each of those applications.

The S in Flatpak stands for Security.

Flatpak is primarily a convenience mechanism for app makers. Any security boundary you may find in it is optional, all defaults are always toward not breaking apps. Apps pretty much uniformly either silently get read access to all your files, and even when that is not true they often get permanent read-write access to any file you open in them.

Go look at the permissions for GNOME Papers. Try to argue that it's "sandboxed".

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