Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

lineageos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#81

Post by dispose13432 »

XorNot wrote: post #80
sangnoir wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volunteer open source developers are not interchangeable cogs ('resources') to be redeployed across projects at will by anyone except themselves - they are volunteers and work on stuff they are passionate about. The F/OSS 'community' has some of the most entitled folk on this blue planet - I'm yet to hear anyone suggest pet shelter volunteers work together on a mega-shelter instead of "wasting effort on duplicate rol…

That's a false equivalency. No one suggests IT staff deploying hardware are B duplicating effort because there's a physical correlation between results and resources. But 10 different desktop environments are each solving the same problem 10 different ways, consuming 10 developers time, when a collaborative project would be able to reduce that by a huge factor and benefit everyone. I would also suggest it's naive to…

>But 10 different desktop environments are each solving the same problem 10 different ways, consuming 10 developers time, when a collaborative project would be able to reduce that by a huge factor and benefit everyone.

Most of the time, they don't merge because they don't want to.

For example, the guys working on Gnome3 wouldn't want to work on LXDE and vice versa. People want to scratch their itch. If I have a light computer (or have heavy tasks), I cannot run Gnome3. If LXDE didn't exist, I would go without a window-manager or would switch back to Windows.

And many who would look at an "ugly" DE like LXDE would switch back to Windows if they didn't have Gnome3.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#82

Post by vbernat »

g_p wrote: post #35
gsnedders wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's totally true—though for many having some secure updates would be better than none, especially given the number of kernel bugs that are only locally exploitable (i.e., if the rest of the system is up-to-date, locally exploitable issues are less, but not none, of a concern). One thing I wish there was more visibility of is "is this device still getting security updates", because there's often almost no visib…

Absolutely - userland is the easiest to exploit, as it's fairly common across all devices (thanks to CTS and standardisation of the runtime) - that's why stagefright was such a big deal! Definitely agreed - I've thought about making such a list to give visibility of this before, but it would be more of a user-submitted list (perhaps with link-up to screen scraping of OEM web pages for the ones that list the latest ve…

Starting from Android 6, it's easy to check if the device is up-to-date from an Android point of view: in "About phone", you have an "Android security patch level" section which should be match the current month.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#83

Post by dispose13432 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #75
gsnedders wrote: post #3

Who's going to make sure LineageOS users get security updates in a timely manner? Is anyone going to be paid to work on it? Any large OSS distribution is going to have a fairly continuous stream of security fixes to ship to their users, and that takes a fair amount of time, and I'm always concerned about whether any new project (okay—it's not quite new, but they have a fraction of the number of developers they did tw…

Something I've wondered about: why does Android require you flash a ROM to update the system? When you buy a windows laptop you'll usually get a bunch of vendor-specific crap, but after doing a clean install you can just pick up the drivers on their website and it'll all work fine. Why isn't this an option with Android?

ARM's SoC lack of standards.

In reality, we were really spoiled with IBM's massive mistake in standardizing the PC (the BIOS), so while Linux may not pick up your monitor, your monitor is made to work to a basic standard (VGA), so you can at least boot up, read the hard-drive, and have basic "keyboard" IO.

This was really important before Win95 made the PC practically MS owned, as you could (and were expected to) install whatever OS you wanted, so they had to have a standard Boot Sector, etc.

ARM SoC are meant to be built by a manufacturer to their specs (their CPU doesn't have to be compatible with anything because nothing is user-serviceable anyways). In other words, PCs were meant to be an Open Standard, while SoC are like old consoles/"dumb" phones.

Unfortunately, due to MS dominance in the PC world, and the collapse of independent computer manufacturers (I remember the days when buying a cheap computer meant not going to Dell but going to the mom-and-pop shop down the block, but you had to know how to fix things if anything went bust), the PC is moving slowly but surely to the appliance world.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#84

Post by dispose13432 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #14
realstuff wrote: post #2

So is it time to buy a phone instead of my OnePlus One as it won't be updated anymore?

You're probably better off using a stock Android derivative built for OPO. There's always a nice variety of them on xda-developers. I used to use CM on everything but over the last few years I've been plenty happy with pure stock Android (+ root). Didn't end up using most of CM's extra features and found that it was often unstable and/or leaving lots of things just sort of half-working.

>There's always a nice variety of them on xda-developers.

I personally stay away from there.

For root level access, I'd prefer relying on a project with actual reputation on the line, and has periodic spot checks.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#85

Post by givinguflac »

Thrillington wrote: post #21
realstuff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why for the first time since I started owning smartphones (2010), I am going to switch to iPhone.

That's not going to fix the problem. Installing updates on an iPhone older than a couple years bogs performance down to unusable levels.

While I agree that's been the case in the past, supported devices are fast enough now that it really doesn't slow them down anymore. Even the lowest supported device runs well on iOS 10, and it has gotten official updates years longer than all android devices I know of.

Sure, one could install an updated and more secure rom (assuming it exists for your device). But, the vast majority of users don't care or won't bother to go through that process, rendering it a completely ineffective solution for the general consumer market.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#86

Post by g_p »

vbernat wrote: post #82
g_p wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - userland is the easiest to exploit, as it's fairly common across all devices (thanks to CTS and standardisation of the runtime) - that's why stagefright was such a big deal! Definitely agreed - I've thought about making such a list to give visibility of this before, but it would be more of a user-submitted list (perhaps with link-up to screen scraping of OEM web pages for the ones that list the latest ve…

Starting from Android 6, it's easy to check if the device is up-to-date from an Android point of view: in "About phone", you have an "Android security patch level" section which should be match the current month.

Yes indeed - the downside of this is that it's hard to gather this information together in a way that lets you show people "which devices" are still maintained.

It is much better for users to know if they are on the latest build. Sadly though for (most/many?) devices, the answer is "it's not", and there's nothing they can really do about it, either due to OEM latency in releasing updates, or the OEM having abandoned their phone.

Samsung [1] and LG [2] pretty much say on their own websites that only certain phones will get updates promptly (or at all) - consider their full product ranges and the cheaper devices not even listed!

[1] http://security.samsungmobile.com/introsm.html

[2] https://lgsecurity.lge.com/security_updates.html > Depending on regions and carriers, updates may be released monthly, quarterly or irregularly.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#87

Post by g_p »

djsumdog wrote: post #71
syshum wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never understood the desire to have 1 Homogeneous Platform with no variety, no customization, no personality. To have a large corporate overlord dictating how I use the device I "bought" I see these same statements in the Linux Desktop world where everyone bitches about how All the Distro's are different, and how the Arch way is different from the Debian Way, and different from Red Hat, Canonical etc. That is…

It'd be nice if you could just customize Android on ARM and have lots of different spin-offs in the same way you have various x86/64 and PPC Linux distros. I wrote about this: http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ The problem is with all these ARM boards. As other comments have pointed out, vendors have tons of binary blobs and shim layers that link them to the kernel. Nvidia/AMD do this too with their…

You're spot on here.

To also add, some (most!) vendors make dirty hacks to the kernel source, as they maintain it as a standalone tree for the most-part.

Wired the headphone jack the wrong way around? Don't bother with a new PCB revision, as deadlines are too tight, and getting things perfect seems to have no place; just hack at the driver code in a messy way and change the outputs! It's not like you're ever going to really keep the device supported for a long time anyway!

So you get layered hacks - the SoC maker adds their own hacks because their production cycles are so short. Then the OEM gets the SoC and integrates it with their board, and due to their short development cycle, hacks around any issues they have too. End result is unmaintainable spaghetti of hacks and tweaks, which mainline wouldn't touch in a million years.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#88

Post by g_p »

sangnoir wrote: post #77
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as has been discussed elsewhere, the ability to avoid using google services is a serious disincentive for google to support cyanogenmod.

> as has been discussed elsewhere, the ability to avoid using google services is a serious disincentive for google to support cyanogenmod. The same argument applies to AOSP (cyanogenmod's upstream), but that hasn't stopped Google from supporting it.

With a little bit of careful adjustment to settings, you can disable all Google services on a Nexus device. It takes a little effort, but it can be done - unrooted and unmodified.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#89

Post by lmns »

dispose13432 wrote: post #66
comex wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, the Galaxy S III was released in the same year as the iPhone 5 (2012), so for now your device hasn't lasted any longer than an iPhone. But I don't doubt that it will.

SII last got an update a month and a half ago ( https://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=i777 )

Without any updates for the vendor blobs.

Re: LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

#90

Post by m45t3r »

unethical_ban wrote: post #68
Qub3d wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google offered to buy Cyanogen. ( http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/google-reportedly-tri... ) Also, recall that Cyanogen (the company, not the mod) said that they were going to "put a bullet in Google's head". I bet Google has tried to offer support to them and Cyanogen turned it down.

I can't fathom why Google would buy them. Why not make a version of AOSP that people can actually use, like Cyanogenmod?

What you mean by "usable"? Vanilla Android is really usable nowadays (I have a Nexus 6P with Android 7.1.1, non-rooted with locked bootloader since I don't really root nowadays). CyanogenMod nowadays is more important for their support to multiple hardware then the customization from AOSP per see. This is especially true since for those who really want mods, things like Xposed Framework offers much more customization.
Post reply on HN