Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just an OS, it's an /e/OS.
Yeah, it's an OS that gives a browser error because it thinks the name is a path.
Yeah, it makes searching for bug reports/help rather troublesome
/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
241–250 of 415 posts
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even if GOS doesn't support your device (due to minimum security requirements) why not use upstream LineageOS?
Because upstream LineageOS doesn't support microg out of the box. You can install it but it needs signature spoofing to pass Google's SafetyNet garbage. Bonus point for some roms that allow you to relock the bootloader after the install (iodéOS, CalyxOS).
/e/OS also supports locked bootloaders for devices that have official builds (a smaller subset than the ones with community builds)
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely. Not sustainable as opposed to what, exactly? Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? Focusing on truly open platforms sound nice in theory, but completely falls apart the moment you consider what people want to do with their phones co…
> Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? The cost of writing code has fallen 100x in the past 3 years, and will likely fall 100x further. So actually, yes, thanks to AI it probably actually is reasonable to launch a fully new stack from scratch.
>The cost of writing code has fallen 100x in the past 3 years
Maybe, but the cost of actually shipping a product has fallen by maybe 10%. I don't see dozens of production ready mainstream OSes and web browsers popping up because LLM can dump tens of lines of code per second.
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
If mobile Linux runs through the same kind of tortuous adoption and rejection cycle that desktop Linux is still doing, then it's a non starter before it begins.
> that desktop Linux is still doing What are you even talking about? My non-technical relatives have been using Debian for many years already.
:) Regrettably, that's not the mass adoption we were all hoping for.
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#245I wanted to add a perspective from actual daily use, because a lot of this thread sounds theoretical. I’ve been using a Murena/Fairphone running /e/OS as my primary phone for a while now, and honestly the experience has been much smoother than I expected. My banking apps work, GPS/navigation works reliably, messaging and everyday apps behave normally — I’m not constantly fighting the device or giving things up. After…
This account has three comments on HN, all of them essentially the same type of /e/OS advocacy pablum. "I wanted to add a perspective from an LLM sockpuppet, because I know you're all not deeply cynical and mistrustful yet."
I would second their experience, works well for me
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#246[deleted]
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are zero OSes that are 1/ open source 2/ appropriate for phones 3/ with good hardware support. There's absolutely nothing Sailfish?
Fundamentally, not enough. Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device. Firejail is a good start, but proper user isolation as Android does is the right solution (each app is a different user, and accessing their data/user data is only done through Providers, or IPC), and anything else is naively trusting and not enough, no matter how many layers of…
> Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device.
Honest question: why are mobile devices more hostile than laptops/desktops?
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
/e/OS speech to text uploads your speech to OpenAI. (I think IA was a typo.)
Ugh. Thanks. Hard pass here.
Reading the links posted in a sibling thread it only does it if you have text to speech enabled and they use an anonymizing proxy so openai can't associate sessions with any particular user ie it's not perfectly anonymous and private but I don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model, which the fairphone guy said they tried and didn't feel it was up to scratch.
I don't use e/os but it doesnt' seem like a terrible compromise to me personally.
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#249Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely. Look at the AdBlocker crackdown of Google Chrome. Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it, because it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser that Google spends >$1B/year to develop. Same story for /e/ and…
>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
De-Googled Android was/is a truly open platform. Same result. You're pointing out maintenance issues.
How many developers do we have to maintain this or any other platform without pay? That problem applies to a de-Googled fork of Android, or a complete bottom up build of a new platform.
The benefit of using an Android fork is the labor savings on what's already built.
Maintenance is not going away just because we build a new OS.
Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem
#250Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely. Look at the AdBlocker crackdown of Google Chrome. Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it, because it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser that Google spends >$1B/year to develop. Same story for /e/ and…
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I would say we need both a sustainable free mobile OS in the long term, and a "less worse Android" today in the meantime.
Initiatives like FairPhone paying someone to upstream device support in the mainline kernel / postmarketOS are interesting for both approaches at the same time (but extra effort would be needed, the FairPhone 5 almost working under postmarketOS [1] is kinda irritating, I hope it reaches full support before Lineage OS stops being updated for this device).
Ignoring hardware support, Linux mobile OSes are quite usable now.
Hardware support is the next step, and only then we can imagine the proprietary apps we are forced to use to work there (though Waydroid provides some answer to this as well).
Another way of helping the cause would be, I suppose, lobbying for laws that forbid the dependency on an stock Google or Apple mobile OS. Or, maybe we can dream a bit, mandatory open source releases for those apps and standard APIs.
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...