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/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

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Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#251

Post by benou »

spudlyo wrote: post #167
odeckmyn wrote: post #141

I 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."

Tbh I am using /e/OS as my daily driver and I fully agree, it just works. Bonus points for the Nextcloud integration which I can tie to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance.

I do not understand all the negativity, I think it is a solid alternative in the ecosystem, and choice is a good thing.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#253

Post by codethief »

goldenarm wrote: post #99
samrus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda dont see how both of you cant be right. We need a mobile OS that google isnt involved in. Why not use pure open source android to do it. It can only be cheaper than making it from scratch, since it has alot of work already done on it

(Copying my reply from below) Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess. But I agree that it is a significant endeavor. But the OSS community succeeded in similar projects before, and the current state of the Linux desktop makes me hopeful.

> Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.

And yet the GrapheneOS devs seem to be managing just fine.

> But I agree that it is a significant endeavor.

Yes, in fact it is orders of magnitude more significant an endeavor that just building upon and improving the existing AOSP stack.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#254

Post by codethief »

dbdr wrote: post #247
well_ackshually wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because regular users (non-techies) install all kinds of apps on their phones, from all kinds of sources/vendors, but not on their desktop. Most people use only a handful of applications on their desktop (browser, office suite, …) but they have dozens if not hundreds of different apps on their phone.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#255

Post by kevstev »

cogman10 wrote: post #176
odeckmyn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what? Am i supposed to comment on subjects know nothing about ?

It's pretty strange that the only subject you seem to have expertise in is e/os. Over a year and that's the only thing you've felt comfortable in discussing?

I think this is behavior that should be encouraged online. Staying quiet and letting the experts talk to increase the signal to noise ratio is a GOOD thing. OP has hands on experience with something that is at least for now quite niche.

I used to only really speak about node.js topics because that was what I had real fighting experience with, at a scale beyond what most webdevs had ever seen. Those were also my most upvoted posts by far.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#256

Post by JCattheATM »

well_ackshually wrote: post #221
mapcars wrote: post #116

Earlier 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.

Linux has SELinux as a default option which Android makes good use of, some forks more than others, and setup correctly it is better than user isolation. You could also recreate the protection user isolation provides through policy alone.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#257

Post by vinceguidry »

mghackerlady wrote: post #208
idiotsecant wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise your electric company accepts payments outside of an app on your phone. I further promise that other banks are available that don't have terrible apps. These problems are way more surmountable than you're painting them here.

Plus, you can still do electronic banking and payments. Use your computer, it's a much better experience anyways

Until they start locking that behind shitty proprietary "security" solutions too.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#258

Post by codethief »

fsflover wrote: post #97
goldenarm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more OSS devs active on Android ROMs than OSS devs working on independent mobile OSes. We are running out of time, and we are misallocating ressources. It's like bailing out water from the Titanic. We should prepare the lifeboats instead.

(GNU/)Linux on mobile is the true sustanable, independent OS. It relies on the existing, strong Linux development, natively runs existing Linux apps and guarantees you lifetime updates. What else do you need? Sent from my Librem 5.

> What else do you need?

A proper app sandboxing and permissions system?

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#259

Post by Taek »

integralid wrote: post #243
Taek wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As a startup founder shipping product, I strongly disagree with that.

Give it 12 months, you will see dozens of from-scratch large scale software projects shipping. New web browsers, new operating systems, new gaming engines, new productivity software, we are at the threshold of having an abundance of software that was previously only available from large corporations.

Re: /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem

#260

Post by well_ackshually »

dbdr wrote: post #247
well_ackshually wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is _the_ 2FA device. from SMS, to authenticators, to password managers, etc. It also has access to all of your personal information, your pictures, your contacts, your email. It actively receives notifications and messages from the outside world, from potentially any sender. It's connected through WiFi, GPS, 5G, bluetooth, UWB, every possible connection system imaginable. It can listen to your phone calls, read your text messages, interact on your behalf with pretty much everything in your life, and is a single facial recognition away from automating emptying your bank account. Not to mention the fact that mobile software does tend to want to at least survive a little bit when offline, so plenty of data is stored locally.

It's a key to your life. The perfect target for any attacker.

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