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I'm planning on flashing LineageOS on my phone to debloat and to degoogle, and additionally to increase overall privacy but apparently from what I've heard here that it's not private enough or even at all?
I know about it being less secure because of the opened bootloader and the higher chances of you rooting to achieve what you want with a degoogled phone, but beyond that (especially privacy-wise) I don't know anything.
I've seen a video on how to degoogle it further, but surely it isn't all I need to do.
I need some education.
Unfortunately my phone is so obscure that it isn't supported by literally anything, but fortunately there's an unofficial port of LineageOS I found on Telegram, and that's the one I'll be using. So if you're thinking of suggesting another custom ROM, you're out of luck. Also you can't make me buy a Pixel - that thing ain't supported in my country (5G and others) and it's hella expensive as well.
Use it differently. Decide what information you store on it, which applications you install or disable, what permissions you grant and what services you use.
Just installing an OS to "debloat and degoogle" is not ever going to change anything unless you change your habits and you don't need to change OS to do that.
It does make a difference. One amazing feature of GrapheneOS is the ability to block apps from accessing the internet. That alone makes it much harder for such apps to harm your privacy unless they also malicious.
It sounds like you're saying all you need to do to prevent abuse of your device is to not use the device. It can't spy on you if you leave it on the store shelf either.
I've seen articles talking about how Android will continue to perform functions you specifically tell it not to. How do you fix that by changing your habits?
LineageOS without Gapps won't send information to Google unless you install something that does. It won't do a whole lot to prevent apps from collecting data like GrapheneOS does so it's up to you to evaluate the privacy implications of anything you install.
A locked bootloader protects against two attack vectors: malware modifying the operating system at runtime, and an unauthorized person with physical access installing a malicious operating system while you're not looking (an "evil maid" attack). The former is rare on Android. The latter is rare unless you're a high-value target or dating an abusive hacker.
LineageOS sends connectivity checks, time adjustment requests and system webview (chromium by default and not easy to change) data to google servers as far as I know. Are you sure it doesn't send anything to google? On the other hand, there is an app Invizible Pro on FDroid, which is perfect to prevent such connections. Maybe you assume the user will install it?
Getting around Google's attestation with an unlocked bootloader requires root - I believe the go-to is Magisk and the Play Integrity Fix module. It's also a good idea to put the apps in question on the Magisk denylist. I've been using this for years with good results and would not describe it as "a lot of things".
Is that from installing an app or from install a malicious ROM?
A malicious app could modify the OS, but it would need root permissions. There are three ways that can happen:
The app exploits a privilege escalation bug in the OS. This can happen even if you don't have root access yourself.
The app exploits a bug in a superuser permission manager (e.g. Magisk) to gain root privileges without prompting you.
A previously legitimate app you've given root privileges to gets a malicious update (a supply chain attack).
A malicious ROM is certainly possible. Some random person's LineageOS fork is slightly less trustworthy than its maintainer (due to supply chain attacks).
Getting around Google’s attestation with an unlocked bootloader requires root - I believe the go-to is Magisk and the Play Integrity Fix module.
I'm planning on using KernelSU, because I asked on the Magisk subreddit and it's unironically what they recommended. I looked around here and it solidified my decision even more.
The recommended way for me to install it goes like install custom recovery > install custom ROM > somehow flash preferred rooting solution in recovery > install preferred rooting solution as an app. link
Discover 400+ best root apps, Magisk/KernelSU/APatch/LSPosed(xposed) modules, and step-by-step guides for every device. - GitHub - awesome-android-root/awesome-android-root: Discover 400+ best roo...
The video guy is talking bollocks: plus he has about 50 crypto links to pay the wanker.
Honestly, I have install lineage since 2018 and installed CyanogenMod way before that.
He talks about "Removing bloatware Google packages" from Lineage, there are no bloatware google packages in lineage.
I have just plugged my oneplus 5T with lineage installed into my laptop, and typed this into my terminal: to give me a list of all the packages installed on my phone.
adb shell pm list packages -s >oneplus5-installed.txt
I have 213 packages installed. THERE ARE NO GOOGLE PACKAGES installed.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Captive Portal is simple to disable using adb. Its not scary.
I have 5 family phones with lineage installed
I have just checked Captive Portal on all 5
db shell settings get global captive_portal_mode
all 5 phones the output is:
null
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
you can change your dns rather than rely on your carriers DNS. I use Mullvad DNS
Hey guys! I wanted to root my phone (an iTel P55 5g build number - P661N-H334IJKLN-T-GL-240911V124) but I can't find the free firmware. So can y'all just provide me with the boot and vbmeta img...
The video guy is talking bollocks: plus he has about 50 crypto links to pay the wanker.
Really. Most of the videos I've seen of him are really solid. Plus, I do think the tips he gave are good (that's why I linked it in the first place) besides this:
He talks about “Removing bloatware Google packages” from Lineage, there are no bloatware google packages in lineage.
Yeah if you didn't install GAPPS you wouldn't get any, well... Google apps in the first place. Besides this part, I do think the others make sense because they are making connections with Google.
Captive Portal is simple to disable using adb. Its not scary.
Yeah.
Also I'm wondering about whether to disable this or not, like wouldn't it break functionality?
you can change your dns rather than rely on your carriers DNS. I use Mullvad DNS
Yeah I'm also using Mullvad DNS everywhere since I discovered it in like 2024.
not much info on itel-p55-5g on xda
Yep, I already looked everywhere. The Sourceforge repo and the Telegram group was all I found.
I dont like him because he seems to intentionally pick controversial subjects just to get clicks.
I mean. how controversial can you get by using the headline "LineageOS is apparently not private?" and then go about trying to prove your point by not referring to Lineage.
I can only assume that loads of non techy people would be put off by his claims.
Lineage does not send any information to google nor connect to google. However the apps you choose to install could connect to google. Especially if you use closed source apps.
if you stick to open source apps via Neostore, droid-ify and F-droid basic you should be fine.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It is safe to disable Captive portal if it is already enabled on your phone.
I have disabled it on my aunts and uncles phones, they dont use lineage or any AOSP roms.
My aunt likes the idea of free wi-fi when shes out. she has a list of all the in-store wifi, in my local shopping centre, already stored on her phone, this means that she automatically connects to whatever wifi she is nearest to.
Lineage phones have captive portal disabled by default.
The stock ROM fails to include a libre software license text file. We do not control it, dangerous. LineageOS helps reduce harm but the best option is to get a new phone.
Define "private enough". If you trust that author, and that no one is going to alter the device through the unlocked bootloader, then all you have to do is not install apps or services that you consider privacy-violating.
IMO locked bootloader isn't that important as graphene OS devs make it sound, but I would NEVER trust a software "found on telegram".
I have used unofficial lineage OS before, but that phone was just an entertainment machine, with no personal information on it.
Graphene OS however has security features that other ROMs don't have like improved encryption.
However Pixels are too expensive, I can't afford them either. I'm thinking as an alternative getting a Nothing phone cm 1 (or something) which is much cheaper than a pixel and can run official /e/ OS
Yeah it kinda contradicts with my goal, but really, my ultimate goal was just to debloat my phone. I just learned degoogling from learning debloating so I thought I might as well do that. (the debloating plan I had since 2021 has brought me into this deep rabbit hole of privacy, Linux and many many more)
I'd honestly rather use anything than the stock ones at this point.
Yeah when I have the money I'm planning on buying a Poco phone as well. I heard they're good for custom ROMs (as in supported by many devs), and it's the cheapest and good option for custom ROMs.
There will always be people who will scoff and puff about what is working for you or what works best for you in your attempt to regain privacy. What's important is for you to assess your threat profile, what you want to accomplish, and if LineageOS helps you with that. Just the other day people were scoffing at people buying physical movies and not backing them up in 1-2-3 format. Like, who has the fucking time and energy for that? And it's stupid. It's like scoffing at people who buy books because eventually the binding may fail or the book could get wet so they should've scanned it into a PDF. Or when people scoff at Proton users instead of being glad people are weaning off Google. It never ends and it gets worse the further you go down the hole. Ignore them.
What other options do you have for your phone at the moment besides Lineage? Regular Android? Better off having Lineage.
to debloat and to degoogle, and additionally to increase overall privacy but apparently from what I’ve heard here that it’s not private enough or even at all?
So... there is what is theoretically possible, what's pragmatically feasible with your current skillset, what you believe you need and what you actually need.
If you rely on what is theoretically possible and what you believe you need you usually end up with burn out. If you focus on what's pragmatically feasible with your current skillset and what you actually need instead you WILL disappoint strangers on the Internet but you might remain sane and surely will learn something in the process, thus both improve your skillset AND have a better understanding of what you actually need.
I am not generally in the habit of criticizing the editorial decisions of The Washington Post, my employer for 11 years and an institution that continues to good, important work in covering the unwinding of American democracy. But I think the paper’s assessment of the putative debate over Donald Trump’s signature on the note provided for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday demands some context.
The article’s original headline was “No clear answers on whether Trump signed the Epstein birthday book,” a declaration that was eventually softened to “Is the signature Trump’s? Epstein birthday book feeds speculation.” The article first presents the denials of Trump’s staff and allies that he couldn’t have signed the bizarre, creepy, suggestive document. It then quotes handwriting experts, some of whom who indicated uncertainty about the signature’s provenance. A number of full signatures of Trump’s are shown in an apparent effort to demonstrate variation.
The use of full signatures doesn’t make sense because the signature in the book — created in 2003, before Epstein was on law enforcement’s radar — includes only Trump’s first name. The New York Times compared that signature to other examples of Trump signing only his first name, showing that they are nearly identical. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the note, also published an article demonstrating why the note was almost certainly from Trump, including similar first-name-only signatures from the now-president.
The Journal did so, it’s safe to assume, because its initial report on the letter was rejected as invented or “fake news” by Trump et al. (Trump even sued, claiming, in part, that no such letter existed.) In other words, it probably assumed that publication of the note would trigger precisely the response that it did, an effort to move the goalposts of claimed fraudulence.
There is absolutely no reason to think that the note was not, in fact, from Trump and no reason to think that the signature is not his own. Even setting aside the obvious-to-any-layperson similarity to other signatures, the idea that someone would create a phony Trump letter as a private gift to someone Trump had praised publicly the year prior doesn’t make any sense.
So why treat the idea that the signature isn’t his seriously? Why treat the assertions of people with demonstrated track records of lying on Trump’s behalf — including Trump, his communications team and right-wing influencers — as offering sincere complaints on this particular issue? Why grant them the benefit of the doubt that they actually think the signature isn’t his?
Looking for a simple mini device that I can plug into TV for streaming stuff via browser/jellyfin and similar, with hdmi and control via bluetooth keyboard/mouse. What do you guys recommend?
The mini PC you ask about might lack a bit of RAM and SSD but I think it's good enough for how you plan to use it. The only drawback I see here depending on how you plan to use it, is that if you don't have another device on which you can store your media you will be short on storage very quick.
I recently bought a cheap NAS for storage + a mini PC to stream medias to my local devices through jellyfin and couldn't be happier. If you can look the geekom air12 lite mini PC with the N150 CPU, it's what I got, havent had much trouble to set it up and it's cheap for what it offers imo.
Another advice : ask yourself if you think your setup will evolve in the future and try to imagine how you want it to evolve, if your solution isn't adjustable enough you might have a hard time changing every part of your setup and do it all again.
Thanks for the tip! I actually have an old intel celeron running as a server in the basement, so the bare minimum for this is playing media from the network. But, being able to play simple games could also be fun, so have to think about that one for a bit!
$120. Arch installed no problem, & everyþing worked OOTB
$210. Again, Arch installed no issue, everyþing worked OOTB.
Þe latter is really þe best deal: AMD's þe better CPU, 12 cores, integrated Ryzen graphics, 16GB, 500GB NVMe, and both memory and NVMe are trivial to upgrade. I used it as a desktop, until I got a more recent one. Even þough it's a mobile CPU, it still seems like an insanely good deal, to me.
But þe first does þe trick for half þe price if you know you're only using it to stream.
I þink it's essentially Beelink under a different label, if you recognize þat one. I'd never heard of þem until I started buying þem. Which is twice; I got a Ryzen 7 version þe second time. I'm very happy wiþ boþ.
Older 10th gen Intel NUCs go for cheap on eBay, with memory and storage -- close in price to a Raspberry Pi 5, but more powerful, active cooling without having to buy a kit, and may have greater longevity. An alternative to a Pi if you're looking for one.
I use an N95 mini pc, I have it set up with xubuntu (compositing turned off), and it's loaded with Kodi (+Jellyfin add-ons), and used with a USB remote control. It's a super-smooth. I cast music to Kodi from my phone with Symfonium.
Fedora and plasma run well on my nucs. One is about 7 years old and handles all the minimal things like streaming and containerized services really well.
That's what I do. I have a bunch of .desktop files that just open Firefox in kiosk mode to whichever website I want, and a bunch of .PNG files to make them look like apps. I installed them system-wide.
I'm a pretty big KDE Stan but I decided to give Gnome a go since Plasma Bigscreen is virtually impossible to install for a normal user at the moment. Its not perfect but it gets the job done, and I love the basic parental controls it has. Still absolutely awful in terms of settings though.
My experience with Intel NUCs is that longevity is their greatest weakness. Usually burn themselves out in a few years. Prospects for repair being slim. I’m not sure if Pis are any better, but I haven’t been impressed.
Huh. Maybe I just run mine lighter. Streaming shouldn't take much though. Also they're actively cooled. I'll keep that in mind though in case mine die unexpectedly.
Yeah, luck is a factor for sure. And if you find one for cheap enough it probably doesn't matter. Personally, I'd rather just build a SFF PC with a mini-ITX board. It'll be slightly bigger than a NUC, but at least the parts are all off the shelf and replaceable when something inevitably goes wrong.
If you're not allergic to Amazon, a FireTV stick might be enough, at least for Jellyfin, Youtube/Netflix etc. (not sure about streaming from the browser).
What about an Odroid N2+? That could run coreelec or Android well? For Jellyfin its great, though you're very like going to run into issues if you want the likes of Netflix on it.
Do you need it to do realtime video transcoding of high resolution video (>1080p)? If so, you may need a video card to do it efficiently. Otherwise, that should be more than sufficient. I know others have recommended a raspberry pi, but I don't think jellyfin supports arm CPUs, though I could be wrong. So you'd have to run it in a virtualization layer and that would increase the hardware resources and may or may not be OK on a pi, but likely would not be as energy efficient as a pi usually is and almost definitely will have trouble with realtime transcoding.
To get around the realtime transcoding you can either make sure your devices support the codecs of the videos you are playing, or you can use a separate device to do batch transcoding of the files before giving them to jellyfin. I haven't implemented jellyfin yet, though it's next on my list, so I'm not sure if there are ways to do background transcoding inside it.
If you're not hung up on Jellyfin, check whatever streaming software for it's hardware recommendations, but Jellyfin is pretty good overall from my playing with it. It's not the lowest resource using system, though.
I read OP's question as him streaming from a Jellyfin server to this box, not using this box as a Jellyfin server itself. Could be wrong, though.
Also, it's my understanding that transcoding is 100% about hardware support for the codecs and that integrated graphics that have it (TL;DR: 12th gen Intel) are going to perform pretty much just as well as even a high-end discrete gaming GPU for that task.
(I say "gaming" GPU because I was reading about the Arc Pro B50 the other day and it has two separate sets of transcoding hardware, so it presumably would actually perform better in terms of the number of simultaneous streams it could handle. But short of something like that, it apparently doesn't make much difference.)
This page covers what you need to know in order to select appropriate hardware for a Jellyfin server and take full advantage of its features (e. g. hardware acceleration).
I've been clinging to my 10 year old Logitech diNovo Mini, but when this thing kicks the bucket dunno how I'm gonna replace it. Trackpad has been pretty good, and I like the fact that it turns off and is protected when the clamshell is closed so I don't accidentally press stuff when it gets lost in the couch. We really need an open source mini keyboard so people can make their own and customize buttons, etc.
Thinking of ways to make it more friendly for my SO and guests coming to visit or babysit etc, who are not used to linux (gnome). Any tips there?
Top of mind is auto open browser on startup with fixed tabs for relevant streaming services. But could also be a simple wrapper of some kind, with UI similar to kodi, plex, jellyfin etc - but for accessing content on web.
The problem with a wrapper as you put it, specifically one running on Linux, is DRM. The only way I know of to achieve the desired Widevine encryption level is running the service in a tab in Chrome. Not any other browser, not even Chromium.
Of course you could just bypass all that nonsense by pirating your media, and have a nice easy interface consolidating titles from all streamers - even retaining a network badge so they can see where a given popular show is airing - like what I've set up in Kodi for myself as well as boomer relatives.
Other than that I'd recommend Flirc for input via remote (or LIRC if you have a supported remote already and don't mind some extra configuration)
I finally got round to buying the Beelink EQ14 I'd promised myself. Sips electricity & handles 4k content. Can't comment re usage as I havent got round to setting it up yet. I believe it shipped with Win11 but I'll be putting linux on it
I'll double the Beelink recco. Using a SER5 for a few years now as dual boot windows and linux as an HTPC. Zero issues with PC at 4k and 5.1. My only issue is Dirac doesn't support linux, but that is neither here nor there.
go to wal mart and get an ONN device. The Pro 4k is $50, Android 14. Will run Plex, Tvmate, vlc, netflix apple tv, and any other TV / Video app you want to run.
If it has google play services on it, at all, there is absolutely no privacy.
If you can manage to stick to an F-droid+Aurora+Obtainium setup (maybe with IzzyOndroid enabled in F-droid), you can probably pull off privacy, but in my experience there are at least three major streaming services ive encountered that refuse to run if Google Play Services aren't running and you can't pass the SafetyNet authenticity/security check thing (which raspberry pi is missing the firmware and hardware to be able to support.) Netflix being the biggest of them, I think Disney Plus has issues, and it's been a while since I tried but either crunchyroll or hbo Max gave me a hard time.
ASUS NUC’s are great for simple self hosting needs, got a 13th gen NUC myself with an i7, Proxmox as the host with a headless Debian 13 VM for a virtualized environment.
I tried this with zeroPi and jellyfin, bit the Pi seemed constantly overwhelmed with displaying videos, so I got about a frame every 2 seconds (might have been a pi3b). Have you got any clue what the issue might be? It depended a lot on the particular file I wanted to play as well though, but I wasn't able to find a pattern. Of two matroska/mp4 files one worked well, the other stuttered as hell.
The only thing I have experience with is that the pi’s struggle with newer codecs, like h264 runs perfectly but any video that is h265 is a slide show, if you get an image at all. So I have to be really careful which version of a video I download. It sucks because h264 files are significantly larger due to its inferior compression.
Honestly I’ve got the kids bedroom tv on a Pi 3 running LibrElec just fine. Kodi isn’t that resource intensive so it works great. But if you’re feeling fancy setting up a db to hold all your info so you can share it on multiple end really is nice. I love being able to stop a movie in the living room because I’m getting tired and pick it up in the bedroom at the exact same spot.
The shared backend db with MariaDB was always janky for me. I switched to using Jellyfin for the backend, which tbf could be overkill if you just need the watch states synced.
That is pretty expensive nowadays, if OP wants to go that expensive, getting a mini PC with the latest intel N150. The pi 5 doesn't even have hardware AV1 decoding. By the time you have all of the pi accessories, it is not much of a price difference, but defi itely a performance difference.
Plus you get benefits like actual storage instead of a separately bought SD card, more RAM, 2.5G ethernet, and HDMI2.1 & USB–C displayport.
Then you slap Linux on it (and also hope that plasma bigscreen is a success in the near future) and you have a very reliable 4K HTPC that can decode anything you throw at it. It has enough horsepower to be a home server at the same time, unlike a pi while also having just a bit higher idle power usage (2W or so).
Does anyone have a suggestion for something that can be used with a remote? AndroidTV boxes don't seem to be a consistent thing anymore beyond NVIDIA shields..
I've tried Kodi on librelec, the old Xbox launcher. It has an app called kodi remote: your phone is the remote.
Currently I'm using an old 2013 laptop with Debian and xfce. I've installed KDE connect on it, and it also has an app KDE connect that turns your phone into the remote.
The main advantage of the remote on your phone is you can type text, copy/paste URLs, passwords and whatnot
Random fun fact: back in college, my girlfriend's best friend (and my best friend's girlfriend) was named Elisa. This being the early 2000s, I used an old school flip phone that had T9 for text entry. But "Elisa" wasn't in the T9 dictionary, so I would hit 3-5-4-7 and it would prompt "Elis"—presumably expecting an "e" after—but once I hit that last 2, it would change to "flirc."
It's interesting that that's actually become a thing now.
Its a TV-remote-style device that works like a Wii remote to control the mouse, usually has a keyboard on the backside, and connects to a USB 2.4ghz or Bluetooth receiver depending on the model you get.
I got a $20 Rii and a $10 other brand one to try out. Both are fine. I like the buttons on the Rii better but it has no backlight which sucks because I'm usually watching TV in bed at 9pm. The $10 one's keyboard also responds faster so I can actually speed type.
I've just set up Jellyfin on an Intel NUC with a Celeron J4025, 8GB ram and 1TB ssd and it works flawlessly, can handle at least 3 4k (hardware accelerated) transcodes (didn't test with more). No tone mapping tho, its pretty slow. The thing cost me around 140 eur.
If you really want tone mapping and don't have the budget/space for a dgpu I heard the Intel N100/N150 mini pcs (like you picked) are great. I would be a little worried about the ram tho.
Mele quieter 4c has been really good to me. I was using a celeron nuc, it worked fine, but for quiet moments in videos i could hear the fan. It wasnt obnoxious, but once i noticed it i couldnt ignore it. Mele is passively cooled and the n100 is more than adequate for 4k.
Been using Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM, and swapping between Android 16 (KonstaKANG's AOSP fork) for Grayjay and NewPipe, and some random Linux distro for Kodi and other offline stuff.
I agree it's not ideal, but they're cheap devices that require little setup. Its not like you need to pay a subscription fee to use them for Jellyfin, so I'm okay with it on balance.
Replied from my Pixel phone with stock android as well.
You cannot install everything you could on regular android and if you manage to they won't be remote friendly. Linux apps however can support controllers. Moroever, android boxes come with a default bloated launcher and even though you can switch it a lot of things stay unremovable
Also, in my experience of trying Android boxes first and ending up with a Mini-PC with Linux, the Android boxes which are cheaper than basic Mini-PCs like the one with an N100 that I have, are underpowered, and the one's which aren't underpowered cost about the same as the Mini-PC.
Further, you can install all manner of services running on the background on the Linux machine: mine works as TV Box with Kodi as the frontend that's displayed on my TV, but it's also working as my home NAS and runs a bittorrent server with a web interface on top of an always on VPN, all of which uses very little of its computing power. I manage the "linuxy" stuff remotely via web-interfaces and SSH whilst in the living room were it is I actually have a remote for it and use it just like a regular TV Box.
This in addition to as you pointed out the Android stuff being locked down and often bloated.
I really would advise people against an Android TV box, but if one really wants the lower consumption of those (they do consume half as much power as my Mini-PC, with TDPs around 8W or less to the Mini-PC's 15W) best get an SBC and a box for it, and then install Libreelec on it or a full linux distro (often the manufacturers have a Linux distro for those and there's always Armbian),
I was in a similar boat. I've been using a Ryzen 5000-based mini PC for about two years now. It's running:
Debian for stability
Flex Launcher for the 10ft TV UI
Flex Launcher has shortcuts for Plex HTPC, Netflix in a full screen Chrome page, etc.
An AirMouse Remote with a keyboard on the back and basic controls up front. It has 5 programmable IR buttons that I have bound to TV Power, TV Input, TV Select, and Sound Bar Vol-/+
My kids also use it for Steam and Retro gaming, so I have it launch ES-DE and Steam Big Picture Mode from Flex Launcher.
Other than the occasional tweaking, it has needed very little and been rock solid for about 2 years now. I have a cheap Android TV set top box still attached for when Grandma goes to use the TV. I can switch inputs and hand them the Google TV remote, but my wife, my kids, and I use the HTPC almost exclusively.
Got myself a NUC11 with Intel Celeron N5105. Could've installed the good old Debian, but wanted something a little more exciting, so went with OpenSUSE Leap 16 Beta instead.
Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They're mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they're made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they're cheap but they're just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.
I use one of these which I got from AliExpress along with one of these, though of course it will work fine with mouse and keyboard.
(Please note that I haven't tested it specifically with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse).
I installed Lubuntu on it because it's a lighter distro (it will work fine with the full desktop Linux distros, but why waste computing power on fancy window managers for something that's just a TV Box that's always showing Kodi) and have it always turned on (the TDP of this is pretty low) with Kodi as interface and its runs perfectly.
It's sitting on my living room under the TV.
It's probably a little overpowered, but that means its fan almost never turns on (it's pretty quiet when it does, but silence is better), so I'm also running a bittorrent server on it with an always on VPN, plus it's my NAS. There's room for more if I wanted.
I don't really understand people advising the more powerful Mini-PCs: they're way overpowered for the job hence needlessly expensive plus the TDP of their processors is way more than the N100 in this one hence it both consumes more and is a lot less quiet because the fan has to be bigger and running a lot more often to cool that hotter processor down.
PS: Also the downside of using old PCs for this as some recommend is their higher power consumption, even for notebooks, plus they generally don't really look like a nice TV-Box to have in your living room, which this one does. If you're going to run it all the time, a low TDP mini-pc will probably quickly pay itself over using an old desktop, longer if versus an old notebook.
I share the general sentiment but lower TDP does not equal lower consumption, any "mobile" ryzen since the series 4000 on Zen 2 (7nm) is more efficient at most tasks than an N100 (10nm TSMC node), and barring specific mobo issues all have in general very low idle consumptions. But their iGPUs are a lot more capable, faster at anything, no need to limit yourself to a lightweight Desktop manager. Shop used and you might get more bang for your buck with an older ryzen mini pc than a newer N100 one.
If the thing is not meant to use as a Desktop, why load it with heavier applications that aren't delivering anything useful?
No matter how efficient a core is at most tasks, it can't beat the power savings of not actually running needless code.
My homemade TV Box isn't running a lightweight desktop because I had to "limit myself", it's running one because I'm not losing anything by not having that which I don't use and if that even just saves a few Watts a week, it still means I'm better off, which is satisfying as I like to design my systems to be efficient.
For fancy Linux Desktop things I have an actual Desktop PC with Linux - the homemade TV Box on my living room is only supposed to let me watch stuff on TV whilst I sit on my sofa.
Further, there are more than one form of efficiency - stuff like the N100 (and even more, the ARM stuff) are designed for power consumption efficiency, whilst desktop CPUs are designed for ops-per-cycle efficiency, which are not at all the same thing: being capable of doing more operations per cycle doesn't mean something will consume less power in doing so (in fact, generally in Engineering if you optimize in one axis you lose in another) it just means it can reach the end of the task in fewer cycles.
For a device that during peak use still runs at around 10% CPU usage, having the ability to do things a little faster doesn't really add any value.
Even the series 4000 Zen2 being more optimized for power consumption is only in the context of desktop computers, a whole different world from what the N100 (and even more things like ARM7) were designed to operate in, which is why the former has a TDP of 140W and the latter of 15W (and the ARMs are around 6W). Sure the TDP is a maximum and hence not a precise metric for a specific use case such as using something as a TV Box, but it's a pretty good indication of how much a core was optimized for power consumption, and 15W vs 140W is a pretty massive distance to expect that any error in using TDP to estimate how the power consumption of those two in everyday use as a TV Box compares would mean that the CPU with 140W TDP consumes less than the one with 15W.
PS: All that said, if the use case was "selfhosting" rather than "TV Box (with a handful of lightweight services on the side)", you suggestion makes more sense, IMHO.
I use "Beelink" brand mini PCs for this purpose. (They are the same form factor as your photo.) I have three, and they're all good. I've used multiple distros on them with no compatibility issues, but MX Linux is my daily driver.
They have fans built in, but the cases on the higher end ones are metal, which helps with heat dissipation. The only downside with that is that sometimes USB peripherals get super hot while plugged in, and I had a mouse dongle that would overheat and malfunction. A simple USB hub fixed this problem (the hub itself apparently didn't mind getting hot).
I use a "Mini Keyboard with touchpad" on the ones connected to TVs. I recommend those as well. Rii brand is decent.
The difference between Holocaust denial and Gaza Genocide denial is that Holocaust denial is illegal or a criminal offence in many countries, and is, for the most part, the preserve of marginalised kooks and conspiracy theorists.
No self-respecting journalist considers Holocaust denial a legitimate point of view, and no serious media organisation argues that impartiality requires it to provide Holocaust denial with a platform in any serious discussion about Germany's extermination of Europe's Jews during World War Two - let alone equal time, or beginning and ending every such discussion with "Germany said".
Gaza Genocide denial, by contrast, is a well-organised and orchestrated global campaign sponsored, funded, and avidly promoted - without any hindrance whatsoever - by the regime perpetrating the genocide.
In many states, Gaza Genocide denial counts among its champions elected and other senior officials, influential lobbies and powerful organisations. Its messages are amplified by an international network of conspiracy theorists, fanatic ideologues and hired hands.
Serious media organisations not only consider it a journalistic requirement to give Gaza Genocide denial a platform and equal time, but they also routinely communicate Israel's talking points to their audiences. The BBC's compulsive resort to "Israel says" is a case in point.
Debian 13.1 “Trixie” è disponibile con 71 correzioni di bug e 16 aggiornamenti di sicurezza. La nuova ISO semplifica l’installazione su hardware recente e migliora la stabilità del sistema. #Debian #Linux
Debian 13.1 “Trixie” è disponibile con 71 correzioni di bug e 16 aggiornamenti di sicurezza. La nuova ISO semplifica l’installazione su hardware recente e migliora la stabilità del sistema. #Debian #Linux
I've found it before I've heard about eza, but i think it generally fits my needs better. erdtree combines features of ls, tree, and find, in a way that's convenient for me
Firefox Nightly builds add CoPilot to the chatbot sidebar, expanding the browser's range of third-party AI service integrations. Plus: new New Tab Page widgets.
I have a laptop from 2014 and I'm thinking of installing Kubuntu or Arch. I don't know much about linux but the computer is not important and is damaged so I can screw it What would you recommend? I'm thinking of something customizable (Arch) but easy to use (so Kubuntu is a good option)
If the English is not good, blame the translator 😃👍
I have the minimum requirements for both.
Edit: The computer isn't suposed for be a daily driver. And thanks for the replies.
If you're new to arch, I think maybe go endeavouros. A new install has update scripts and whatnot, and EndeavourOS has good documentation. Going straight into arch involves a lot of reading the docs just to even get a desktop environment running. You probably want to start with the full package.
I'm using endeavoursOS gnome.
Kubuntu will get you familiar with package management, though it could well be managed through a desktop app so you may well barely touch the terminal. But you will discover that there's a fair bit of bloat - not in the windows sense - but apps that you may not necessarily need.
But don't be fooled. While EndeavourOS (and most other Arch based systems) is really good, it still is Arch under the hood. Which means a rolling release and a little bit more risky on updates, because of the constant updates and the newest versions. In case of a problem, you have to hunt it down, and understand what is happening and then solve it. That's why I do not recommend casual desktop users who are new to Linux and want an easy and uncomplicated usage, not to use an Arch based system. Unless you want deep knowledge and are prepared to do stuff and learn stuff in case of a problem.
This is just a warning, so you know what you are getting into. I love EndeavourOS. But it's not for everyone.
You could still distrohop a bit if you want. Debian (as well as mint) is stable, loads of deb packages out there. I really like Fedora (less packages for my use case but COPR is similar to AUR in that there are thousands of packages outside of the main repositories). Ultimately like they said, Arch is really out there with the rolling releases, but sometimes you'll need to reconfigure. Recently firmware packages got split up and that required manual intervention. Haven't had any breaks so far, so EndeavourOS is a good choice imo.
EndeavourOS is a great distro for learning I installed EndeavourOS with no knowledge of Linux and with it, now I know so much about Linux if you have zero patience and just want an operating system that works use Linux mint
I don't think regular Arch is the best for new Linux users at all but their are a few Arch based distros with graphical installers.
I'd you are trfh savvy, the Arch install process should be ok though.
Of the 2 you suggested, u would go with Kubuntu. KDE is a very popular desktop environment and Ubuntu is solid. I've moved distros quite a bit but always go back to Ubuntu-based. I've been on Mint for the last 6 or so years.
Agreed. I used Manjaro for 1.5 years and then switched to EndeavourOS. Not sure how long its been, maybe 2 years or so. EndeavourOS is fantastic and its closer to Arch too, but comes with some stuff preinstalled and configured so you don't need deep knowledge and build your own distribution (unless that is what you want).
If you're new, you should go with Linux Mint. It works great, and provides sane GUIs and defaults for everything, unlike most other distros. For a newbie, it's the best decision. I've personally have had 5 people on Mint so far, who were originally unhappy that I formatted away their Windows partition when I told them that "I will fix it for ya" (when they came to me with their laptop because I'm a computer person), but they came to all love Mint. They said "why wasn't I using this before?".
I use Linux since 1998, and I still use Mint. Sure, I have other distros installed (Debian-Testing is my default on my desktop, many other distros on my various laptops), but Mint is the one I use the most. It just works. Just because I know how to fix something in the command line doesn't mean I want to spend time doing it, GUIs are just fine!
In fact, I'm able to easily deliver both the MacOS and the Windows look, to lure new users in with Mint, haha: mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/1…
I'm putting together a persistent USB installation of Linux Mint for a friend who wants to switch to Linux. It has both a tweaked Cinnamon in it, and an XFce that looks like MacOSX. Lots of apps & games pre-installed too. He'll love it, I'm sure.
Most distributions are customizable. The reason why Arch has this reputation of being customizable is, because it comes barebones and you have to build your own distribution out of it, basically. That means you need to learn and understand Linux and how Arch works. With other distributions you can still customize them to lot of degrees, you just start with an already build and tested environment.
However, there is a new trend of so called "immutable" or sometimes also "atomic" distributions. These work a bit differently, where the system is protected and either updated as a whole or in a special way. So deep customization (depending on what you exactly want to do) can vary in those cases. An example of such a distribution would be SteamOS 3.
Then there is also the release model you choose: rolling release or LTS (also known as point release). Archlinux is in example such a rolling release, which means it gets updates and often has the newest software available. But this comes at a risk and often the user need to understand what is happening in case of a problem. Therefore I recommend a beginner to Linux a system that uses a point release system (or also known as LTS in example) instead. Ubuntu uses such a system, and many others. This means it gets security updates and little features over time, but not always the newest version of a software with the newest features. What you get instead is "stability" in the sense of not changing too much and being less risky as well.
If you are new to Linux and want an easy to use distribution that is much Arch, but a little bit easier with preconfigured environment, then I would look at EndeavourOS. But I really do not recommend an Archlinux system as your first distribution, if you want an easy to use system. There are lot of other choices to make too, like the GUI and so on. Looks like you already like KDE Plasma if you want Kubuntu in example. The question is, why are you looking for a different operating system than Kubuntu in example? Why don't you install Kubuntu. I ask, because the answer could help in finding the right one for you.
There is this concept of desktop environments on Linux. It's basically the GUI and lot of associated applications. Archlinux does not have one and starts with a terminal and you have to enter commands and know which GUI you want, and set it up yourself. You can install the same that is used in Kubuntu, it's called KDE Plasma. You can install KDE Plasma on most distributions, its part of what makes Linux customizable. But if you do so, you have to set it up, therefore I highly recommend a distribution like Kubuntu that has it already.
EndeavourOS in example has in the graphical installer the choice what you want to install, and one of them is KDE Plasma. So you would have Archlinux with an easy installer and configuration, with the GUI and toolset of Kubuntu.
Also not entirely 😉, for example Plasma Addons and Application Addons from KDE Store can also be managed this way. But overall I guess you are right, as its not recommended to manage (pacman) system packages with Discover. I don't even know how to set this up, if I wanted to. Half a point goes to you. 😛
I would caution against Arch. I don't think it breaks as often as people suggest, but you may run into a problem like steam not loading when you want to play something with your friends. That gaming session is shot unless you can fix it on the fly. After a few years you will, but you need to balance those kinds of growing pains against doing something you want to do in the moment. Don't expect it to work the way you expect every time.
Install a fixed distribution like Ubuntu, Leap, Debian,... and enjoy Linux and read the wikis of the chosen distribution. Once you have gained experience, install a rolling distribution.
I think it's more about the specsheet than anything else. If Mint works, great! I'm just not too sure how well it will work (It should work well, but is it the best option?).
I agree, without know how OP wants to customize, I'm assuming they want to customize the desktop GUI. If that's the case, anything KDE will be a good starting place. They also implied they don't mind if they mess something up, so the specs probably don't matter for being the most resource efficient. It just needs to be hand-holdy enough to help get a little experience for them, then they can jump into a more hands on distro
Try each. One of the great things about Linux is how easy it is to just hop around. Spin up a ventoy USB with those and maybe even a few other ISOs. Then boot into each one and go through the process of finding a piece of software (krita, for instance) and running it. Do a doodle of a dog and run a few filters or something. Doing so will tell you which one you like, which one your computer likes, etc.
It's pretty impressive that they pushed the bicycleIt's pretty impressive that they pushed the bicycle to the right 800 times and half the times it went left instantly.
Ideally you would want to remove your carrier sim. your carrier will know you are in a different country (roaming), and use a good VPN
I use mullvad VPN and that spoofs my GPS and location.
I use Lineage on my current phone with no google apps and dont use a fake location app.
If you are using a default, we love google phone, I am not sure if disabling the gps and location stops google and its apps from having access to your location data.
I dont trust them to honour the pressing of a button to disable anything, when location and advertising is so important to them, and their other surveillance friends
The water from a garden hose comes from the same plumbing system as tap water. Theres nothing wrong with it unless your hose is made of toxic materials or something.
Idk. I feel like the fediverse was always destined to be various walled gardens with like a few common hubs that connect them. The issue is that .world took the exrta step of blocking their ability to see our comments. Its not due to being defederated i think they did something else to not see us even on instances we are both on.
Its kinda funny. Ive seen a few .world tech support posts and been like "Oh... i could help but u wont see me" lol.
I'm pretty cool with being forgotten most of the time, especially in general "stir the pot to make people fight over stupid shit instead of building guillotines for the real problem" kinds of stuff.
But yes, I drank (and do sometimes drink) from garden hoses. It's just tap water delivered with more volume and outdoors.
Not just garden hose, public lawn sprinklers were also free and available hydrating source. Even when off you could always find some water if you sucked hard enough. Tasted a bit rusty.\ This is before purified wastewater / greywater used for irrigation.
Stablecoins are not just a tool for crypto traders, Pure Crypto co-founder Zach Lindquist argues. They’ve become a uniquely efficient channel for Treasury demand.
This was my SO's fav feature in windows, but in mint it closes all windows. Is there any fix? I've looked all over and cant find it. They'd really appreciate this feature as theyre apprehensive about linux already!
Edit: SOLVED. Very easy. Right click on yhe app in the taskbar and select configure. Then you can adjust the middle click function.
On windows when you middle click an application it’ll open it in a new window, this sometimes would let you open multiple windows of an application that typically isn’t an option elsewhere.
Hypothetically I have Firefox open, if I middle click on the Firefox .desktop file again it would open a second Firefox in a new window.
What are you talking about? Middle click on links opens them in new tabs, middle click on tabs closes them, always has been, and works on both windows and Linux, both chrome and Firefox.
GNOME does this by default, so if it's not working for your SO, they probably have installed some extension that modifies that behavior. I've never used Mint, but I think it's pretty heavily modified from base GNOME, so maybe it has that feature disabled with whatever their suite of modifications does. I'd poke around in the panel settings if those are exposed to you in Mint.
Mint's desktop environment, Cinnamon, is technically based on GNOME Shell (i.e. a fork of it), but we're not just talking "pretty heavily modified". In many ways, it's its own thing now and you can't really assume things to work similarly.
I switched to Hyprland some time ago and now I made a video showcasing all the features I've implemented for myself, check it out!
In this video I'm showing my current Hyprland setup as a demo. I'm showing features I implemented myself and my configuration of hyprland, waybar, tofi, wlogout, kitty and other tools.
Dr. Nick Maynard, from Oxford University Hospital, talks about Palestinian boys in Gaza with gunshot wounds he believes were caused by deliberate targeting by Israeli soldiers.
Disarm your resistance fighters or we'll send our rabid attack dog to genocide your civilians while openly giving them the tools to do so. America is a terrorist state.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
The most inspiring CEO stories come from workers who rose from entry-level positions at their firms to the top. What happens when AI takes those jobs away?
I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
[YouTube thumbnail showing a person doing the soy face while pointing at a map of the world linking a Moai from Rapa Nui with the Albanian flag] EASTER ISLAND 8 ALBANIA CONNECTION?!?!!! What Historians Don't Want You To Know About Albania 132k views - 8 months ago CONSPIRACISTORY The TRUTH is too dangerous to be known but I am willing to share it with you, know more by subscribing to SmugVPN over at ht…
[the conspiracy YouTuber, looking shaken and paranoid, is now talking into his mic] EASTER ISLAND AND ALBANIA TWO CIVILIZATIONS NEVER IN CONTACT BUT IF YOU LOOK ON A MAP... YOU CAN DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE BETWEEN BOTH LOCATIONS !! COINCIDENCE?!
[the YouTuber is embedded on a massive depiction of a Moai as the head of the Albanian flag symbol, floating in space, under the hashtag #BELIEVE]
The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Nepal has issued an order requiring all social media platforms to be registered in Nepal.
Based on this, the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has instructed all network service providers to deactivate 26 platforms, including Signal, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, and others.
To lift the ban and operate legally in Nepal, each platform must:
Register with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
Appoint in Nepal:
A Point of Contact
A Resident Grievance Handling Officer
An Officer responsible for monitoring compliance with self-regulation [1]
Submit an application in the prescribed format along with required documents, as per the Directives on Managing the Use of Social Media Networks (2080 B.S.). [2]
Good move of Nepal to ban Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp, VK, WeChat, Threads, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, and Discord.
That said, Mastodon and Signal also being included, is dumb. What Nepal could do better, is that upon visiting one of the banned sites, users are advised to download another, decentralised medium.
One of the reasons I prefer Matrix even though anyone I know in real life uses Signal so I use Signal practically everyday but Matrix sparingly. Federated matrix servers. I worry how resilient Signal can be if enough countries ban it, not really confident in the US or EU countries or any countries long term for encrypted chat for the Signal Foundation, and also signing up with phone numbers. Phone number providers being another point of regulation
We're still waiting. Everyone else has done this while Signal is getting left behind. It's still effective at combatting anti-libre malware, WhatsApp and Discord.
For those people calling for the use of Tor, it's trivial to block Tor and I2P at the ISP level. It's not hard to get lists of relays and just add them to the block list.
You can use shadow socks, but you have to be careful.
We are globally heading into very privacy adverse waters. If they start making ISPs block VPN and piracy suspected sites, we might have to come up with something new to communicate in the open.
We're going to need something that looks like accountably legitimate traffic on the surface, but contains our actual content underneath.
We're celebrating the World Day Against Cyber Censorship by officially announcing WebTunnel, a new type of Tor bridge designed to assist users in heavily censored regions to connect to the Tor network.
The authorities run their own web tunnel. The people that connect to it go on a naughty list. Everything it connects to goes on a naughty list.
Wash, rinse, and repeat that in a geodiverse style. Share your IP list with everyone else charged with finding web tunnel. wholesale block all traffic from any node participating. Start with a one day band, move to a one week ban, kick them off the network after that.
Tor easy to block yes ,i2p much more harder like really harder, in Russian tor blocked ,vpns blocked by DPI system ,but still it possible to bypass it with something like byedpi. But i2p working much harder then just tor or usual http
While i2p's node DB isn't exactly in the clear. There's not so many of us that you can't getting pretty good picture of where it's running.
China's already doing a really good job at blocking it. The protocol is secure in that you can't tell what anybody is doing on it. And the node DB is only somewhat accessible. But that's nothing a little coordinated espionage won't suss out.
Every ISP throws out a couple of honeypots. You don't allow nodes to stay connected to it for long so everybody keeps refreshing it. They're thinking it's a DDOS. It's distributed fingerprinting.
You throw up a node, record its regular traffic, start up I2P and see who it connects to. F with your netem so they connect, but eventually discard that connection because it's unstable. You get to cycle through a bunch of connections that way. Everybody who sends more than a SQL injection script to it is running I2P. You occasionally dump people off of it. New people try to connect. You dump them off of it. You create a list. That particular list isn't worth much, the spread factor is kind of low on the protocol. But you share your IPs with everyone else that's running honeypots. Or you just throw out a lot of honey pots in a lot of places if you're a state actor. Everybody that hits the list gets logged.
We're heading towards some dystopian shit now. If ISPs get to the point where they're allowed to kick you off for suspicion of shady things, the protocol is baked.
It's nearly impossible to identify the traffic. It's fairly impossible to identify the origin or the destination of things from inside the network. It's difficult to block individual connections from happening you're real time. But, if they manage to make unidentified traffic illegal, it's not that hard to detect that I-2p is happening and kick people off wholesale. Once the list is shared, they could just black-ball the IPs on every ISP for any connection.
The real problem is, I'm having a really hard time finding some protocol or method that wouldn't fall to this. You could easily hide some really low bandwidth stuff stego style in audio or video streaming from person to person, like say, forum traffic, but if you wanted to stop people from moving music and videos back and forth, I don't know that you could hide that traffic through any means.
The I2P netDB isn’t a single dumpable list like you’re suggesting. It’s a Kademlia DHT stored across rotating floodfill routers. Floodfills aren’t static — routers get promoted/demoted based on bandwidth, uptime, and capacity — so the view of the network is constantly shifting. A normal router only ever queries small slices of that DHT, meaning you never get the “whole picture” from one vantage point. That’s a deliberate design choice to make enumeration hard. On the traffic side, I2P isn’t just onion-style routing. It uses garlic routing, where multiple encrypted “cloves” (messages) are bundled together into one garlic message. This kills the simple “one in → one out” traffic correlation trick. Add to that the transports: NTCP2 is indistinguishable from normal TLS over TCP, and SSU2 is UDP with full encryption, padding, and replay protection. From a DPI standpoint, it looks like generic encrypted noise — there’s no clean handshake to match on like with old Tor circuits. As for blocking, I2P is decentralized. There are no directory authorities to censor, no fixed bridges to burn. Floodfills are chosen dynamically and constantly refreshed, and peers discover new ones automatically. The bigger the network gets, the harder it is to enumerate and blacklist enough routers to make a dent. Censors can try whack-a-mole, but the distribution effect scales against them: more peers in more ASNs across more countries means higher cost to block. So yes, you can suspect I2P traffic if you really try, but fingerprinting and wholesale blocking don’t scale — the protocol was designed specifically to make both correlation and censorship exponentially harder as adoption grows Details:
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
The I2P netDB isn’t a single dumpable list like you’re suggesting
I am well aware of the design and structure, you mentioned I said some things there that I clearly didn't say.
So yes, you can suspect I2P traffic if you really try, but fingerprinting and wholesale blocking don’t scale
If I2P is outlawed, and there's a strong possibility we'll see that in our lives, and ISP's are told if they let unchecked traffic through they're responsible for legal ramifications. They'll run enough nodes in enough places and terminate enough end user accounts (at the very least in the US) to make people not want to run it.
I don't care if you can't DPI it. If it's on their network, and they start running peers, they will be able to root people out, not everyone, but they don't need everyone. If the ISP's share their data with each other, making that map isn't all that hard.
The floodfills can be secure and ephemeral AF, but P2P traffic, even packaged through garlic still passes through points that can be seen.
The whole design is supersmart, and from a legal stand point it's solid. But when we lose protections of beyond a reasonable doubt become stripped, they'll tear that network apart user by user until no one wants to chance running it.
It's not about trying to determine if the traffic is i2p or tor by its port or contents. It's about running a copy of the client and logging who it connects to.
When you have nearly limitless funds and servers everywhere already, it becomes a lot easier to insert into the network and start looking around.
Then when you couple that together with a series of corporations that can do that, and they start sharing data.
Then you change the legal landscape so they can just kick you off your internet provision because you are connecting to I2P nodes. It's kind of like entrapment, but legal.
by John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.
I want you to look around the world political landscape around tech and ask yourself if you think most of these chucklefucks even understand what they actually say. They only care that they won't like it and want it gone and think writing that down on special paper makes it go poof.
I live in a "developed" country and my country past the online safety act and most of the people who did so didn't know what a VPN was. Three previous administrations, The Blair-Brown one, the conservative one, and the latest one, have all floated the idea of banning encryption in some form. Do you really think the Nepali government understand what Mastodon is other maybe "it's a bit like Twitter".
Most people in Nepal with any sort of sense have a VPN to get around this.
I had a quick look at Hamro Patro. It's a Nepali calendar app which features news, horoscopes, exchange rates, radio and podcasts. It is the most popular natively developed app in Nepal basically.
Just to put this into context: Imagine if the American Government banned the NBC app or the British Government banned the Sky News app.
Facebook is considered social media... It's far from. The term "social media" today, just means that there's people there, and they can talk/write with each other. 20 yrs ago, it was a moderated and safe place to meet people anonymously, and then if you clicked, you could decide to meet IRL. I made lots of friends back then. Since 2008 I have maybe made 3 friends online on FB... Most on FB are internet warriors.
This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In
A hacker has broken into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that pitches its users’ dashcams as “virtual CCTV cameras” around the world that other people can buy images from, and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken from cameras in drivers’ cars. The videos obtained by the hacker and shared with 404 Media capture people clearly unaware that a third party may be watching or listening in. A parent in a car soothing a baby. A man whistling along to the radio. Another person on a Facetime call. One appears to show a driver heading towards the entrance of the CIA’s headquarters. Other images, which are publicly available in a map that Nexar publishes online, show drivers around sensitive Department of Defense locations.
The hacker also found a list of companies and agencies that may have interacted with Nexar’s data business, which sells access to blurred images captured by the cameras and other related data. This can include monitoring the same location captured by Nexar’s cameras over time, and lets clients “explore the physical world and gain insights like never before,” and use its virtual CCTV cameras “to monitor specific points of interest,” according to Nexar’s website.
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A hacker has compromised Nexar, which turns peoples' cars into "virtual CCTV cameras" that organizations can then buy images from. The images include sensitive U.S. military and intelligence facilities.
E: apparently it needs to be said that I am not suggesting you switch to Linux on your phone today; just that development needs to accelerate. Please don't be one of the 34 people that replied to tell me Linux is not ready.
Android has always been a fairly open platform, especially if you were deliberate about getting it that way, but we've seen in recent months an extremely rapid devolution of the Android ecosystem:
Samsung, Xiaomi and OnePlus have removed the option of bootloader unlocking on all of their devices. I suspect Google is not far behind.
Google implementing Play Integrity API and encouraging developers to implement it. Notably the EU's own identity verification wallet requires this, in stark contrast to their own laws and policies, despite the protest of hundreds on Github.
And finally, the mandatory implementation of developer verification across Android systems. Yes, if you're running a 3rd-party OS like GOS you won't be directly affected by this, but it will impact 99.9% of devices, and I foresee many open source developers just opting out of developing apps for Android entirely as a result. We've already seen SyncThing simply discontinue development for this reason, citing issues with Google Play Store. They've also repeatedly denied updates for NextCloud with no explanation, only restoring it after mass outcry. And we've already seen Google targeting any software intended to circumvent ads, labeling them in the system as "dangerous" and "untrusted". This will most certainly carry into their new "verification" system.
Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with.
Android as we know it is dead. And/or will be dead very soon. We need an open replacement.
Samsung One UI removed bootloader unlock officially in latest update. Learn what this change means for custom ROM users, developers, and how it affects Android enthusiasts.
Unfortunately there's a lot(!) to do to make Linux enjoyable on a phone. I bought a Pinephone some years ago. And in addition to the slow hardware, the entire software/desktop experience isn't great. While everyone else has instant messengers, Linux doesn't have connected standby and emails and messages just don't arrive unless the screen is on. It wastes quite some power, and there are a bazillion small little quirks and annoyances and it's barely usable if compared to a regular smartphone. I think someone needs to invest quite some more time and money until this becomes a thing. I mean don't get me wrong, Linux and the low-level system is awesome. And it's brilliant on any server/laptop/desktop computer. It's just that there's so many things missing for a proper phone experience. And it's not just mildly inconvenient, but like people expect instant messages to be delivered...
Notifications should be pretty simple, and probably should be provided by hardware manufacturers. But the support will need to be implemented into the apps that need them. That can potentially also fix the battery issue.
PostmarketOS I think is probably the most mature Linux mobile package currently but I'm no expert on the subject.
It’s been a while since the last update on GNOME Shell mobile, but there’s been a huge amount of progress during that time, which culminated in a very successful demo at the Prototype Fund Demo Day...
I'd argue that Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish are the most mature offerings. Both OSs are (or at least were at some point) developed as commercially viable alternatives to the duopoly. That gives them a headstart in terms of apps and overall pollish.
The postmarket shells are catching up, but you still get instructions like "drag and drop a file from your file manager to open it", which doesn't work on a phone. Phone UX still seems like an afterthought in many cases.
Postmarket OS is a desktop Linux system, but for phones. UT and Sailfish on the other hand are mobile OSs, that happen to use much of the same tech as desktop Linux. They are therefore much closer to the duopoly (for bettet or for worse).
Have had both. Still have Sailfish because the phone is cheaper. Also I thought Ubuntu Touch would be discontinued and I no longer use Ubuntu on my desktop, but an Arch-based OS. Best thing you can do is buy a phone that's most compatible to the OS.
So Fairphone 5 or Pixel 3a for Ubuntu Touch, and Jolla 2 for the Sailfish.
Dang it, I gotta change, I guess, unless this info is old:
Keep in mind that there is no known way to unlock the bootloader of the North American (Canada and the USA) editions of the Galaxy S23. - xda-developers.com/how-to-unlo…
Sure. It's just that the timeframe is a bit disheartening. To me... so all of this is highly subjective. We had the Nokia N900 in like 2009. And I was expecting to live the full Linux experience within a few years and those things to become a bit more affordable. And today it's almost 16 years later and it doesn't feel like we've come substantially closer. More recently we had Librem and Pine64 put some effort and publicity into it, and that's also been 5 years. The mobile/touch desktops made some good progress. PostmarketOS is kind of nice. But there are entire layers missing like the app framework in Android which enables such app lifecycles, connected standby... Sandboxing and a fine-granular permission system for proprietary apps (or just modern mainstream usage) is kind of in its infancy. And I'm not even sure if everyone is going to use Flatpak for everything. And all of those missing things are huge undertakings.
So I'm not sure when to expect such an every-day phone... Maybe in 2030 or 2035? But that's kind of late if the headline is "more important now, than ever". Because all the while Google is moving more and more stuff from AOSP into their proprietary Play services and it's getting uncomfortable for me. We have a deadline with the Google messes with the allowed apps on a phone starting 2027. And my life includes more and more mandatory apps, or I have to forfeit taking part in society, culture, convenience or riding a train... This year, Google started giving the GrapheneOS devs a hard time... Now they're making it even more complicated.
So of course not everyone has to use it, and I'm first of all concerned with my own wellbeing. But I really don't see a solution in the near future which is going to address the important issues if today and the next few years. So I'm a bit unsure if a Linux phone will come around and help me before it's too late, or if I need to find other ways to deal with it.
True but I also never even considered it before because honestly open source Android works really great on most devices already. Now that that's all basically disappearing, hopefully more people will be more dedicated to creating an alternative.
Can you help me understand why Linux phones are the answer rather than a community maintained android fork?
Android is already fully featured and has a solid ecosystem so it's usable now, not in 5-10 years with less of a need for adjustment for the people who want to switch.
Basically, why take several steps backwards and start from scratch?
I strongly disagree with this comment. I'll answer your numbered points from the original post one by one with my perspective:
Development would happen completely in the open, since its community driven
A community android fork wouldn't directly solve the issue of manufacturer locked bootloaders, but neither would Linux mobile
I originally messed up on this bullet point, but this is the correction - the play integrity API would be unusable on both community driven Android and Linux mobile
Developer verification will not apply to devices running an OS that isn't Google certified, which a community maintained android fork would not be
Do you disagree with any of these? Would love to hear your thoughts
You wouldn't need it on Linux mobile because...it's not Android
But then you need apps that work on Linux (optimised for mobile/touch). You can also easily create Apps for Android without play integrity API necessity.
Realistically an Android fork makes more sense.
Though in my ideal dream world a Rust based mobile wayland compositor (etc.) will be the future of open mobile OS. I hope there's enough (financial) interest to at some point reach that future.
Don't get me wrong, I'm the first promoting an Android free mobile Linux, free of big company influences.
Though, what I meant is that there's very few mobile optimised apps on Linux, and I doubt that changes soon. The Android SDK is very matured (like Compose for UI). It's fairly easy to create a good native app experience in Android. Less so for non-Android Linux. (I've developed apps for either) Think about that alone, which further complicates adoption, which TBH is just necessary to get to an ecosystem that us usable for daily usage.
I hope that changes sooner than later, but the current alternatives are just not there yet.
comparison is the thief of joy and it's unrealistic to expect a product of grass roots community effort to compare to a product that benefits from deep pockets that can afford the finest talent and a considerably long head start.
I'm not sure. A phone is kind of a tool, same for a computer. Ideally we weigh our options (aka compare them) and pick which suits us best. And this grass roots effort isn't doing a half-assed job. I have almost everything available. I can do regular tasks, edit videos, do computer aided design, do heavy database stuff, run the bookkeeping for an entire mid-sized company, a server farm or almost anything I like with Free Software and Linux. I don't think a phone is fundamentally different and I kind of have the same high expectations for that niche. We're already doing great with lots of other things, both more niche and more ordinary stuff. And oftentimes it does not include money from tech giants.
How cool would it be to out of nowhere see Valve come out with a SteamPhone based on Arch which does everything you ever hoped for and runs on high quality hardware including all the features that others took away (colour alert pixel, 3,5mm jack, replaceable battery), complete with dual boot or a containerised Android-mode for running apps that would never work like banking or eID. Would buy instantly.
i know it is still google, but i just started searching ebay for a used pixel 9 - looks like they are around $400-500 (pixel 10 came out last month). i figure getting graphene os on one of these may be an inexpensive path forward... still looking for good options, tho.
i'll have to check out fairphone. i remember something about them not being available in the US, but that may be old news.
There's a distributor, Murena, selling the Fairphone 4 and Fairphone 6 in the U.S. now. The Fairphone isn't fully usable with Linux yet, though. Calls, camera, and GPS all still apparently aren't working 100% with postmarket OS. I'm not aware of any other distribution that does any better. wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Cat…
Yeah, I don't think the Fairphone 6 is quite ready. In fact, since none of the previous Fairphone models ever got to full Linux usability, I don't really expect it to happen.
I think the best option -- and really the only option -- right now is the Furilabs FLX1. I'm planning on getting one soon.
The main problem is that mobile OS is simply not useful without banking or government apps and they won't ever appear on FOSS systems because giving control to user is exactly the opposite of what's in their interest.
That's insane. They don't have TOTP? Or Passkeys? Or (God forbid) SMS or email verification? The only 2FA option is using their shitty app? I think I'd rather switch banks...
It became hard to do that in my country. I changed banks twice in a year because they became shit but even the third one uses its app as 2fa. At least it is a better bank...
I know Credit Mutuel can provide you a physical card with a bunch of codes of which one is selected at random at auth time Had family use it because they had a Huawei phone
If it is what the user wants, then it is a factor for adoption. It is a hard sell to say "yes it can only perform half the stuff you usually do with a phone, but you don't need that anyways". It comes across as condescending, too.
My intent is not to be condescending. It is to make people aware of the fact that they have a choice: They can choose to subject themselves to increasingly-closed and exploitative platforms, or they can choose the extremely minor (I would argue non) inconvenience of using the browser or another computer to access their banking information.
I had nothing but problems with banking apps. Can't do anything if location is off, or it doesn't like your IP, or if it thinks you have rooting software installed. And if it doesn't work right, no one at the bank knows how to help. I just stopped using them, eventually.
Those card readers are called TOTP and we can do that with apps now. Not like the specific app in question but just like a standard password manager that stores all your TOTPs.
In Sweden many parts of society requires an app called BankID. We authenticate getting mail packages, sign contracts, book a time in health care, etc with this app. It's needed everywhere. Buying a bus ticket. A phone without this app is not sufficient to function in swedish society.
A little bit yes, since the BankID is owned by private companies. There are those who are working on a free software version and some people think that the government should have an official authentication app free from private interests. But it's been hard to make people aware and care about these issues. It's like the xkcd worlds smallest open source violin. At the same time, many things that relate to proving that I am me has become very convenient in this society. For example I moved to a new apartment and they just sent a link to the contract and I signed it with the app and that was that, I did my taxes by just checking that the info they had was correct and signed it on my phone, etc.
Many cheaper online banks rely on their mobile app. Your debit card will not work wirhout an in-app confirmation. There's no web interface ("not secure enough").
Can I switch banks and make my life less convenient? Sure. Would I do it just to stick it to google? No.
I would like to move away from Android and iOS. But I'm not sure it's really feasible. Hell, I might even have to move fully to iOS, because that's what the wife uses. That's the challenge with Linux or alternative OSes on mobile. It goes against the purpose of the device - it needs to be able to interact with the people in your life.
Because I have Android and she has an iPhone, we can't easily share headphones (her AirPods or my generic ones) or some of the other accessories. For instance, I don't want a device without a 3.5mm jack, so none of my headphones work for her. About the only thing we can share is the USB-C cable, and it's less efficient on my device. We have to use Google Maps to share location, the built-in functions don't talk. We have to use regular SMS and calls or Discord to talk, because FaceTime and iMessage don't have compatible Android software. I love her with all my heart - and frankly speaking she's worth more to me than software advocacy.
That's what causes ecosystem lock-in. As Sartre said, Hell is other people.
That's the challenge with Linux or alternative OSes on mobile. It goes against the purpose of the device - it needs to be able to interact with the people in your life.
That's not a "challenge" that linux can ever overcome. The only way to overcome that is to ask your wife to switch to a device that's respectful of you and her and everyone else.
I find it extremely irritating that so many people see other devices and "well I can't interact with them the way I want to so I'd better join them and contribute to the problems so I can also not interact with other people on free systems".
Okay. Give me a Linux phone that works out of the box that suits the following dealbreakers:
Compatibility with iMessage and FaceTime. This is essential because my wife, my MIL, and other family members all use it. I can't be expected to change everyone over, I need to be compatible with the majority. I might be able to convert them over time, but it's going to be gradual.
Always-on location information sharing with location data pulled from both GPS & terrestrial sources.
Full support for Bluetooth devices, especially the ANC function of AirPods or similar (oh, and support for my mother's hearing aid app).
OS-level support for telephony and SMS + MMS + RTC messaging. With software that has an instantly usable UI.
A deep repository of trusted software with clear and easy UX that doesn't require adjustment - it all needs to "just work".
That's the issue. It's a great set of goals, but I need to be able to make my wife happy today. Long-term plans for the future are all well and good, but we live in the present. So at the moment, Android is the most open compromise I can make.
Listen, if you want to continue to contribute value to companies that want to fuck you at every turn because you can't be bothered to find other ways to overcome minor inconveniences, that's your prerogative. You're just like most people.
Compatibility with iMessage and FaceTime. This is essential because my wife, my MIL, and other family members all use it.
Once again, this is never going to happen. And this is NOT essential. To anyone. Not even a little bit. Ask your family members to use a different platform. There are HUNDREDS of messaging apps that all do the same fucking thing but aren't behind Apple's Walled Garden. If they can't be bothered, then it must not be important. I ask my friends and family to message me on Signal and most of them don't have a problem with it.
Wait make ur wife happy because of these devices? That insane how u guys were living 20 years ago let not pretend that this devices bring something really important that was not possible to do in old way in the past ,they gave just some alternative way to do stuff including all ur things u said.I am so glad that my family don't understand anything in tech in such things and using just usual phone calls and for video they using something like telegram
Like you, I value my relationships and by extension my mental health more than which messaging app I use.
I hate Meta with a passion and them acquiring Whatsapp is probably the most disappointing acquisition of all time to me, but I'm going to continue using it because my wife, family in Latin America, and world friends all use it. And being lonely and out of touch isn't worth the satisfaction of knowing my data isn't being scraped to me. Others in these threads always seems to disagree here, and they're free to do that but it's not a lifestyle I'm interested in.
I'm making changes where I can; I self host a server for my media, photos, files. I'm going to install Graphene on my phone soon. I'm interested in picking up a cheaper older phone to try a Linux mobile OS on. I have my phone auto connect to my pihole to block trackers when I'm out of the house, etc. But I know as soon as it's something I have to inconvenience others with, it's not going to work.
You're not a dick for saying it. But switching and losing daily driven features isn't really something I think is fair. And that's why I would be the one to change. I'd probably just keep the apple device on hotspot mode and use the Android as a tablet and VOIP call/text device.
i tried to do this recently but it created a lot of friction in daily life. once the masses have moved on, it's hard to keep the old stuff, sadly. it's really frustrating.
that's the hard part for me. daily life is bearable with a dumb phone but i live in a semi-rural area. when i go to civilization it's high friction without a smartphone.
I really want one but I dont think I can live with it daily. Too much shit relies on phones now. Linux is perfect for my desktop and I never need windows, but I dont think a linux phone is gonna work for my banking or investment apps
Banks allow me to login via their web interface, send money to a BSB + Account Number or even a PayID (email / phone number) but using their app to do just the same is too far?
It's total rubbish, honestly I've resurrected my OG ridge wallet and am planning on installing Graphene on my P7P to skirt the phone payment trap.
I was one of the few in Australia to test Google wallet (thanks for the free cash google) and thought it was the bees knees. It's a fucking long con and fuck I feel dumb for falling into it.
Worst still my drivers licence is a phone app, so are my work certificates and probably a bunch of other shit that I'll only realize later.
I guess fuck around and find out shows its ugly face eventually.
Ahh we don't really use cheques here in Aus. Payments being electronic doesn't worry me, pay lands in my account the same day it's processed, sometimes the following day if the accountants miss the deadline.
Sending someone money is generally instant using PayID, without fees too.
I use neobanks (no physical branches) so as long as their web interface works well enough for me, and I can use my own 2FA (not SMS based) ill be happy as a pig in mud.
Just wait and see if the climate turns to no physical cards in the next 5 - 10 years...
That sounds nice. Banking in the US is slow. Do you have something like shared ATMs for physical currency deposits, or is that also not used anymore?I can't imagine us going no-card, but it sounds like your system is already most of the way there.
Phone apps are a pet peeve of mine. Most apps are just websites wrapped up in the ASAR archive format. Instead of spending all this extra money to build an app, just make your original website responsive.
I imagine building on existing AOSP project like GrapheneOS or LineageOS would be the easiest path forward. There is already a decent ecosystem of open source apps available. You'd still need to figure out what to do with proprietary apps like Slack that regular people might need for day to day use.
Ultimately, the problem lies in lack of a hardware vendor willing to take make open phones that are geared towards running a custom OS on without having to jailbreak them. I really think the only way this can happen is if there was a vendor that focuses on providing a full stack open source system for mobile. Maybe a company like Liberux or even Framework will succeed at doing something like that at some point.
Liberux is using waydroid to add compatibility from what I've seen, so that may be the way forward where you have a base Linux system, and then a layer for running Android apps on top of it.
My thinking too. I don't think we need a Linux phone from stracht but fork android and make it work without the play service. It's the hardware manufacturers that are the problem.
Yes. Need the kind of love desktop hardware got for Linux with mobile hardware. I don't need tap to pay and mobile deposit. That can come when the ball really gets rolling and the user base is too large to not service. For now I'd be happy with consistent phone/text support, signal application, a mobile Firefox, and the phone dockable to run full desktop applications. Strong enough hardware. Google are a bunch of jackasses. Need more phones to support PostmarketOS or something
Most apps I can replace with a web browser but the mass market has shown it's preference for an app store. Got to get payments integrated into Flathub
I'm in a similar position. My next phone will be a Linux device I just hope I can install Signal everything else I can do on my pc instead even if it's less convenient
You're saying that an Android without any Google/Samsung/Xiaomi/OnePlus interference wouldn't solve the problems introduced by Google/Samsung/Xiaomi/OnePlus?
We already have it (LineageOS etc), the problem is that the hardware they run on (reflashed unlocked android phones) are disappearing and the whole android ecosystem with proprietary 3rd party software is getting more restrictive.
My first thought was that a hard-fork of AOSP would be a much better solution than a Linux phone. But when you have locked down hardware, it doesn't matter, because you simply can't install it.
I still think a community fork of AOSP would be more efficient than Linux mobile.
I have a Pixel 9 Pro which is supposed to get security updates until 2031 but at the pace Google is closing Android down I wonder if it will even be viable to stay on an AOSP degoogled ROM until then.
I feel like the future is leading us to a place where we will have to reduce our mobile computing to a trusted but slow and unreliable main phone while keeping a secondary mainstream device for banking/government apps.
I also think disconnecting the concepts of "pocket computer" and "always-on two way radio with location tracking and internet connectivity" are things you could put in different physical devices.
Have you looked at the state of how open source smartphone os projects are funded? Seems like not enough people think it is currently important. i saw no bump in funding since the announcement. I would say the best bet is trying to help one of these projects with fundraising and trying to educate or convince enough people it is worth investing in. and obviously donate if you can. Although to be honest even i don't do that (i think i invest enough in FOSS).
Once i bought a phone i tried to pick one that is friendly for FOSS projects and went with a pixel (which grapheneos recommended). so voting or signaling with your wallet is an option.
I also think something like codeberg. where anyone can be a member if he pays fees that help fund the organisation and democratically elect a board that decides what to fund could be helpful. codeberg has a pretty good organic growth so that is encouraging but i don't know if there is enough interest in that.
Keep Open-Source open for everyone! Codeberg is a Non-Profit Organization, with the objective to give the Open-Source code that is running our world a safe and friendly home, …
Imagine if vendors like Anbernic started shipping devices that had phone hardware supported with open software. That would be so rad. They already run android and Linux and have a vibrant community.
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I think the biggest thing lacking in this kind of hardware is displays. Where can you find a phone-sized 1080p display that doesn't require signing some NDA or reverse engineering the specs? OLED would be even better for battery life.
I don't see that probably 360p black-or-white e-ink display is going to be a good experience unless you're comparing it to a flip phone.
I mean, you could approximate a phone with a lot of SBCs out there right now, if you stuck a screen onto it. A lot of them even have SIM modules. If somebody wanted to go full hacker you could probably 3D print a case for something like a Banana Pi, stick a cheap touchscreen OLED panel in there and Frankenstein up a battery. Would be a lot of work though and I’m sure getting all the shit working would be nontrivial.
Yeah and it'd be thicc as fuck and completely ridiculous to carry around. Wouldn't even fit in your pocket. At least this is compact and doesn't have sharp edges and wires hanging out trying to unalive itself.
This one requirement I believe to be already met. Mobile kde, for one, is pretty nice. I believe the bottleneck of linux phones are really in the hardware
Smart phones are simultaneously such a wonder of human engineering and have become such a disappointment of human greed.
This whole situation has made me just care less about my phone, and use it less in my life while I use Linux PCs much more.
I don't see my phone as a "computer" at this point, really. It's more of a communication appliance. If I'm launching an app that's not texting, calling, GPS, or music, it's probably a replacement for a website I'd normally use on a PC.
Linux phones could change this though. The idea of your PC being your docked phone would work great for most use cases. Unfortunately though, even though I would love it I don't really see the general public jumping at the chance to get back to the desktop experience. I could maybe see a little traction in the business world.
I found myself using my phone less and less too, and to be honest, I'm even feeling healthier mentally. Portable devices were supposed to improve our life, not make it worse. Big tech did something really terrible to phones 🙁
Oh same here! My reduced phone usage has been part of a much larger overall improvement in my well being and being able to live in the moment and be content.
I recently saw a video from a harvard dude talking about how we NEED to be bored. It's when we fall into our baseline mental state and start thinking through shit and figuring life out. And not doing that can lead to anxiety and depression and other bad shit. Given my experiences, I certainly cannot disagree.
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This is pretty much how I am. Use my desktop for important things. On weekends I try to not even have my phone on my person and I check it a couple times a day while it stays in the bedroom like a house phone. Life is so much better without it.
I unfortunately still do like to take it with if walking/biking/driving but I wish I didn't. Id like to have another phone that only makes phone calls for that but has my same number. Its funny. When I was a kid we didn't even think about it because none of us had phones. Going on a random dirt bike ride miles away with nothing. Better (also unsafe) times.
Im tired of smartphones consuming everyone's minds.
Im tired of smartphones consuming everyone's minds.
Resisting the standard smartphone addiction just makes the addiction of some others so much more apparent. My own wife is still pretty badly shackled to hers.
My one friend cant stop staring at his when driving. He lives near me and sometimes I wave at him driving by and hes like I never even saw you. Like dude, youre a fucking idiot.
I was on board the Fairphone hype, and while I think they have a good message, I actually think Pine64 does exactly what they do - just without the flashy marketing. Fairphone still uses AOSP as the basis for their OSes, so there is still a risk of hardware lockout by Google. This is leaving alone other issues like no headphone jack and USB 2.0 for the latest generation's USB-C.
This is actually the same reason I think Ecosia won't succeed in the long term unless they build their own search engine. Luckily it looks like they've already started delivering results as of last month.
I should also mention that the PinePhone isn't Scott free from criticism either. Think I read somewhere that the camera is borked because the latest firmware or software update messed with the camera module functionality. No real fix for that soon, which sucks.
Or they could just give up. I've ssen some people in my friend group who were really into custom ROMs, no GAPPS and all that. Most of them just gave up when buying a new phone. Probably because they felt like missing out on Features, Apps (Banking and such) or a good and working camera. Also it's a lot of work to put into developing custom ROMs and probably even more for Linux Phone Operating Systems. Pleople get older, have other priorities etc.. Ich would also like to use a Linux Phone as daily Driver but it is not really appealing in it's current state. So i really hope, you are right and perople will start working on that more. I'm probably just a bit frustrated from trying to get postmarketos working on some old phones. I am really stunned about how much effort has been put into that but the systems are so closed down and different, that it is a leally hard job to cover them all.
That's what Google wants, because people gave up on Jailbreaking iPhones because the loss of features wasn't worth it on the other side. Google probably doesn't love that their flagship is the best model for use with custom ROMs, plus they're also trying to lock out Xiomi as well for what that's worth.
While giving up is an option, someone somewhere needs to coordinate this entire OSS ecosystem to focus on singular projects. I would love to see a privacy and FOSS non-profit do exactly this.
I was on board the Fairphone hype, and while I think they have a good message, I actually think Pine64 does exactly what they do - just without the flashy marketing.
Exactly what they do, except it's not a functional product. "Overpriced, underpowered, and half-finished" is the motto of pine64.
You missed the overpriced and underpowered part. In the EU, the pinephone pro cost 600€, the same as the fairphone 6, and it's significantly worse in every single way. Even if it actually worked, who in their right mind would pay that much for a device that's going to run out of ram as soon as you open a few tabs in Firefox?
They base a lot of their development on the community though. So if the community isn't up to it, then virtually no one at Pine64 is.
I doubt they'll be fixing anything since they seem to have stopped selling them.
Also, if we go by their track record with the pinetime, PRs fixing basic functionality will be left open for years. Like how they can't be bothered to accept fixes allowing the stopwatch to run in the background and not reset when you get a notification, let alone QoL improvements like being able to tell the time on your watch while the stopwatch is running.
I doubt they'll be fixing anything since they seem to have stopped selling them.
Pine64 stopped selling the PinePhone Pro due to a lack of demand.
The regular PinePhone is still being sold, although a lack of a "Pro" qualifier certainly doesn't help their optics of producing a competent phone at today's standards.
I have a laptop with a SIM slot and I can use mobile data, SMS and even make voice calls. It doesn't support 5G though. Also the mobile hardware is crap, and I get like a 10th of the speed over 4G that I do on my phone, plus it chews through battery.
So yeah, awesome feature but not as nicely implemented as I'd like. Hopefully the Thinkpad version is better!
I have been wanting a Linux phone for ages but I can't afford a librem and pine seems to have stalled out. Just found out about Furi and now I'm wondering if it really is that good. It's still expensive but it at least doesn't look like it'd choke on running a calculator app.
You might have better luck looking at the distros themselves. They're not exactly great on any device yet, but there are cases where mobile Linux distros work at least equally or a little better on select Android phones than they do on dedicated Linux phones.
A linux phone, or any other open source alternative, has ALWAYS been more important than the ones we've got. Being locked into an eco-system, has always been bad for the regular user. It's about companies controlling people and the market, and it should never have to be a choice between a rock and a hard place.
I really wish that the Firefox phone had gained more support. And I wish that there will soon be a linux-phone for the regular person, all over the world.
But I guess people in general keep choosing to lock themselves in, by using Google and Apple...
It's not a simple matter of choice. Most people aren't invested into open source, they just want to get by and do their mundane things. Most people aren't even aware of all the privacy stuff or abusive practices of big business, it's usually some more outspoken tech savvy person that decides to expose what the big corps are doing. So using open source is not a choice, like you would be just choosing your preferred cereal brand, but both a technical and political act. And most people are just into the system, they aren't aware of all malicious things around them.
Not only that, but also when companies feel threatened, they start imposing new technical and legal restrictions to make using OSS harder. Since they have more control over the whole production supply chain of devices, they have more cost effective options and even partnership with hardware vendors to make using OSS very hard or impossible.
Android is Linux. It uses a Linux kernel paired with a BSD based user land. Also there is an AOSP version of Android which is Android without all the Google bits. LineageOS and some other security oriented firmwares derive from it. That isn't to say Google are necessarily happy about this entirely but at the same time, they open sourced most of Android and probably see it as a useful antitrust defence and the impact of flashed devices barely more than background noise.
The issue of bootloaders is an orthogonal matter since Linux or not does not mean bootloader or not - many black box devices use Linux but you won't be flashing them any time soon - TVs, set top boxes etc. I would argue that regardless of OS, there should be a right to repair law (e.g. in Europe) that allows people to maintain devices beyond their warranty. And if Samsung et al don't want to do it, then they should have an obligation to unlock devices upon request.
It's the exact opposite. ASOP is open-source, it's in the name. Google's Android has been less and less open-source every year, they've been replacing AOSP apps with their own and vendor-locking them to their GooglePlayAppsWhatever system (hence microG), shunning away the open-source variants they replace.
I mean open source is that. The only reason open source exist is to be able to close some parts of its source (i.e. compatibility with privative software). Google promoted open source because it allowed them to close it whenever they want it. The Trojan Horse was always there, at plain sight.
That's why it's important to distinguish free software from open software. In most cases open source is just a label that companies can use to look friendlier.
Yeah, it depends on the specific licence clauses. AOSP uses Apache Licence 2.0 which is normally regarded as a free software licence but it also could be regarded as Open software as by the OSS definition.
The problem with this licence is that it allows distribution of binaries based on the original source code without having to share the source or even changing the licence.
This means that Google could effectively take the entire (some part of Google Android is already close sources) AOSP in the current state (with the contributions of thousand of individual developers) and use it to start developing a close source Android OS project. Since Google are the main developers of Android and they could shift OG Android into a closed environment that could be no longer compatible with the old one. Google also is the main provider of security fixes. Since phone manufacturera want to able to run Google Android (stock Android) this could make old Android versions (before privatization) incompatible with phones.
For example let's say that Google Android changes the main OS ABI or API. Then programs made for Google Android wouldn't be compatible with other Android versions.
This would basically make users decide or you stay with Google Android (close sourced) and you trust use because "do no evil ;)". Or you stay with your free software versions of Android that are no longer compatible with current Android programs basically forcing you to have an OS that's not able to run "common" programs, basically isolating you from the mainstream smart phone use cases like having banking apps, mainstream chat apps, etc.
You think if they used another licence it would be any different? Countless open source projects have a GPLv3 + proprietary licence which is way more evil than Apache - they poison the open source with GPLv3 so no competitor can contribute without revealing their changes while they themselves can use the proprietary licence. e.g. Trolltech and QT for example but there are many others.
And frankly you should be blessed that you have a fully fledged, open source phone OS you may fork and build from. The OP wants a Linux phone OS and AOSP is a Linux phone OS. There are many forks of Android, closed and open that wouldn't exist if Google had just decided to be proprietary from the get go. They were under no compulsion to do this but they did. If you have used LineageOS, or GrapheneOS for example then you are a beneficiary of this. You are completely at liberty to have a de-Googled modern phone OS powered by Linux right now.
QT uses one or another, either GPLv3/LGPLv3/GPLv2 or privative. Poisoning open source? If you refer to the fact that they allow a closed source licence, yes I also dislike that. But how is GPLv3 poisoning anything? If you want to use and modify/contribute to the QT project then you have to maintain user freedoms unless you pay QT for their rights. In the end term, the user is always respected since contributions to base qt are always free software. With only a GPL licence then the developers would need to share source code for their distributions. The Multiple-Licence allows third party developers to gain "fully-paid-ownership" which allows them to close source it.
Also since QT it's allowed to be shiped with LGPL third party devs can close source their parts of code that link against QT.
So it's basically an interesting way of having a permissible licence while keeping the QT base fully libre.
Probably you refer to the availability that open source philosophy gives. Yeah, that is the principal difference between libre software and open software. Open software advocates for fully openness for the sake of the developers no matter what they want to make later with it, libre software advocates for the source code of the end user.
the vast majority of commenters here either have no direct experience with a Linux phone or have seen some shallow youtube "review" of a dude swiping the same two screens left/right and extrapolate a buncha shit that has no contact with reality.
presently, and in the foreseeable future, linux phones aren't an android alternative, they are just linux on the phone, i.e. they allow you to do linux shit on a handheld device.
like, the bleeding edge version of any variant (plasma mobile, gnome, phosh) isn't even close to an Android phone from like 2015, let alone a modern one.
and that's before we touch on the pillars of mobile tech like fluidity, battery efficiency, reliability, etc., none of those things are even in a remotely passable state, not to mention - using the thing to make calls. you are better off forgetting about the camera, as well.
and the reason is simple, not only is there a gargantuan discrepancy between evil corp's resources and the predominantly unpaid enthusiasts, each dev team's reimplementing shit that's already solved on another platform. apple doesn't have to do that. google as well.
then there's the idea that the javascript-backed Gnome - that has issues running fluidly on super-capable hardware - is the basis on a low-power device on which the linux mobile phone experience is built. reinventing solved shit, but in a stupid way - THREE FINGER swipe on a phone, really?
although there's a solid app base, the apps that are supposedly mobile friendly are few and far between, most are just downright unusable on a vertical screen and dog help you if launch an electron app. firefox, even with pmOS patches (useless without) is tiresome to use. you can forget about dating, ubering, banking, or even just using a messenger everybody else does.
if you're squeamish about flashing custom recoveries and ROMs, the e.g. pmOS install process is way, way, way more involved and failure prone. if you go with ubuntu touch or mobian, even more so.
finally, if you're talking about a device that you've grown accustomed to to the extent that you're using it subconsciously, swiping and multitasking and such whilst walking and dodging other pedestrians - no such thing exists over here.
I'm just tying this up because I keep reading about "switching", people are either delusional or misinformed, there's nothing (yet) to switch to.
get a couple of $50 ex-flaghips to play with, flash lineageOS on one and pmOS on the other and that should hold you over for a coupla years.
There is always the option of waydroid to get android apps running on Linux. It's not a great solution, but a first stopgap measure to use services only available as apps.
I'm not critiquing your post, I'm just clarifying to a buncha people who think otherwise that it's not an option.
as to "it needs to accelerate", I have a grim outlook. the only way it's gonna do that is if there significant cash behind it and if everything non-essential is to be trimmed so that a functional platform can emerge. in our ever-enshittifying, greater-fool-theory investment climate, it's doubtful there loose capital with such an agenda, and I doubt such a thing is even on the horizon.
same way with "desktop linux"; like, can you image where we'd be if every development effort is geared towards just one DE/WM, instead of tons of duplicated efforts and abandoned paths? yeah, good things eventually emerge from all the disjointed chaos, but eventually. and our joint assessment is that we're running outta time for the "eventual" part.
It's not great but lots of people are using it today. There are multiple entire businesses built on it. It may not fit your needs but it obviously does for many. And it's only going to get better.
see, this is the thing I'm talking about. your comment indicates that it's possibly a viable alternative to OS developed by the wealthiest corps in the world, for 15+ years and people are like "ok, there's options"...
it is nowhere near that. it's linux on a mobile device, and that's such a humongously, vastly different thing than an alternative and that should be the first and foremost thing said. same with the "android is linux" bozos in every thread (it really, really isn't) who are not helping the issue, at all.
and then we can dwell on whether it's usable or not in its present state.
Eh, for desktop I'd say we're just about there now. For people who don't use their computers for much more than gaming and web browsing Bazzite works pretty great. Helped a friend who doesn't do much more than that build a PC and install an OS and they seem to be doing fine with it, no complaints so far.
if you're squeamish about flashing custom recoveries and ROMs, the e.g. pmOS install process is way, way, way more involved and failure prone. if you go with ubuntu touch or mobian, even more so.
What?? PmOS and Ubuntu Touch both have very easy, foolproof installers. No idea about Mobian to be fair.
I've been using only Linux-based mobile OS's since my first smartphone, and while you're right for a lot of the new breed made for the Pinephone and Librem, Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch are both perfectly useable for lots of people. Both have a decent app ecosystem and both support running Android apps to fill in the gaps (I've used both, the proprietary Jolla one is about as good as it gets and is practically seamless for like 99% of Android apps).
Of course there's going to be people who will respond to me to say they can't possibly switch because of that one app that they and 5 other people in the world use, as though they're in any way relevant to what I've said. Just the same as when I post about people switching to Linux on the desktop and there's always that one Fusion 360 user who thinks everyone in the world also uses Fusion and so Linux can't possibly ever work for anyone.
UT and mobian need to be on stock, ancient versions of android prior to flashing. that is a challenge in an of itself, just check out what it takes to go from lineage A15 to stock A9. also, "easy" and "foolproof", please - you're not the target audience I'm addressing.
To be fair, Fusion 360 is pretty good... I hate to love it, to miss it. I can't wrap my head around the work flow in FreeCAD.
But more often I am shocked by people saying they have to stay on windows because of Office... Like, the fuck? MS doesn't even want you to have that installed on your computer anymore and is pushing all web based, but that is going to keep you on Windows?? Nothing there is particularly hungry, just put it in a VM if you absolutely can't get by with one of the several great alternatives.
This seems less of a problem in the US, but a lot of stuff here is done with some apps that won't run on these distributions.
Banks have created identity provides which now the government also uses, and they're locked down to Android and iOS. Without these, making payments or do other stuff you need your identity for gets hard. And there are used by hundreds of thousands of people daily.
If they can run, I'd switch over instantly, but now I'm pretty much stuck.
Thank you. I get what OP is saying, but in general I'm so over the constant blind Linux fanboy hype train, like it's the solution to everything. One of the reasons I can't really stand to be on this instance unless I see something important enough to hit the front page. I'll take a remotely functional windows dist with customized features over pretty much any linux OS anyday in order to not struggle to complete the most basic, essential tasks.
Life's too short to spend glued to Stackexchange instead of actually getting shit done.
What are these "most basic, essential" tasks you're struggling with? Outside of trying to get Discord to screen share nicely with Baulders gate 3 and the one time I accidentally overwrote the python 3 install and broken it, it has been pretty pain free. And I code with both .NET and with Android Studio, I do plenty of gaming, and some photo editing. All things beyond the most basic of tasks and I rarely run into issues.
Have I broken a Linux install? Yep. But I've also bricked a handful of Windows systems poking around in the registry.
Well if your not running Google's OS. how can they push updates. My issue with GrapheneOS is the trackers. It well not warn if trackers are following you and if you have trackers you well spam everyone with unknown tracker following you.
Tracker blocking uses flawed heuristics. The only methods that are typically used are static lists which is just badness enumeration. There is nothing stopping the app/service from sending the data down a different domain that isn't blocked or a domain that can't be blocked without breaking the service.
Adding to that, how do we even decide what is a "tracker"? What is the definition? Some might say it includes all telemetry or crashlytics. Are those inherently malicious?
I don't think it would make sense for GrapheneOS to include something flawed like a "tracker blocker" that lulls people into a false sense of security. They use robust and meaningful methods for improving the privacy and security of the OS.
Reclaim your smartphone with Jolla C2 The Jolla C2 isn’t for everyone. It’s for those who believe their privacy is their own to control, who value trust over shortcuts, and who have the courage to make their own way.
I'll switch away from Android when there's a good alternative, but I'm not very technical and need something with a nice GUI and an easy installation process. Hopefully Linux will offer something like that someday, but I don't think it's there yet.
How delusional are you? Samsung holds over 20% of the worldwide mobile phone market, only beat by Apple by a few percent.
And that is ignoring the obvious trend from Google to lock down the Android ecosystem to only them and their partners. If they have their way, they will make 3rd party ROMs nearly impossible, block all 3rd party apps, and close the door on fdroid. Maybe what has been done so far doesn't affect you, but if no one gets in their way, it absolutely will and soon.
Is it possible to have my normal shitty samsung for stuff that wont work on a linux phone, and have like a pinephone for simple calls and stuff, but have them both use the same phone # ? I doubt.
Cuz when hiking or something I like a phone for safety but I dont want distractions.
I just hope that this time we go Free Software and not committing the mistake of going Open Source for a 3rd time (BSD/UNIX AT&T; Android/Google). Unless we want to fall with the same stone yet once more.
Android going Open Source allowed Google to close Android once it got mature. It's a Trojan Horse, yet people still go Open Source and then complain when some company closes their source.
Because the license allows the closing of the code whenever a coder wants. BSD has that problem. It gives so much freedom that it can go against freedom itself. Microsoft took Kerberos (BSD), forked it and extended it. The MS fork gained ground against the BSD one and MS closed the source when its fork was the most used, pushing out the original BSD version.
I get where this argument is coming from, but I don't think there are meaningful differences in the success of gpl or other copyleft licenses, vs permissive ones (except maybe cases where someone was willing and able to enforce the gpl in court). Companies are no less capable of doing EEE with copyleft. There are also plenty of permissively licensed software projects that have gained a lot of popularity, just like some gpl ones have.
The difference in traction between Linux and BSD probably has more to do with the same kinds of forces that allowed Android to succeed and then crowd Windows phones out of the market.
My bad for no specifying I didn't use a very specific naming indeed. Normally Open Source it's used for source code that's not copylefted or copylefted software that does not defend user freedom (Although Open Source OSS does not say that, indeed GPL by the OSS definition is open source software). On the other hand Free software is commonly used for GPL like software (although most of the so called open source software could also be named free software). Also free software does not refer to "gratis" software. For a better explanation you can check this and this.
Anyways what I wanted to point out is that software that protects user freedoms and is copylefted (like GPL) protect users because the source code is protected from being closed if it is distributed.
On the other hand some open source software (open as open access), like ASOP, give open access without any protection for the user freedoms. For example the BSD-3-Clause.
I prefer to use the term Free Software instead of Open Software, because it points out that the whole meaning behind the licence is to maintain source code freedoms. On the other hand Open software seems to defend the fact that the source code is open but not its freedoms.
Both OSS Open source and FSF Free software definition refer to mostly the same set of licences, which in order to distinguish you would need to check the particular details like copyleft, etc.
There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share, and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also fi...
By the way, outside of our brawl down below, I do agree with you 100% that having a fully functional and modern Linux phone would be an amazing thing to have.
Check out postmarketOS, a real Linux distro for phones with a 10-year life cycle goal and mainline kernel support. It’s not daily-driver ready for everyone, but it frees you from Google and OEM lockdowns. If we want an open mobile future, this is the project worth supporting.
This looks great. If we collectively threw some funding behind a few worthy projects, even at 1-10€ per person, it could really accelerate development.
i still think that the Linux Mobile ecosystem is bad(even worse then Desktop Linux), i want it to happen and become as good as Desktop Linux. also i am pretty sure Google cannot fully get rid of AOSP, especially Android is put on any phone that isn't Google. tho even before the Goolog fuckery these things where there. Samsung required a a leaked program to Unlock its bootloader(Odin which is proprietary), and would trip Knox. Xiaomi required a wait time to unlock its bootloader, and the unlocking bootloader thingy is proprietary. Banking apps wouldnt work with root and stuff, even before the Play Integrity API forcing thingy.
indeed, android has been a shit show for the last couple of months and its not looking good.
i was thinking that this will make rooting and by extension custom ROMs prevalent again which hopefully will take us back to the golden age of android modding, but be careful of what you wish for.
I DON'T WANNA USE STOCK ANDROID. DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA
i know that's why i'm seething right now, we are hopeless since custom roms and root users are a fraction of a fraction that is people who install apk outside google
removing the ability to unlock bootloaders is just another negative
The point of this post is that there are worrying trends that threaten the entirety of the Android ecosystem. Not necessarily today, but in the near future.
I also don't know them in depth, but from what I do know: Lineage is a tweaked AOSP, it doesn't have google apps by default but can use MindTheGapps or microG /e/OS is either their own system or heavily modded android, iirc it uses microG by default (mG is by /e/ i think) Graphene is a privacy-focused android mod that can use googl.e apps, but in a sandbox. Basically a separate space, where they don't have any access to outside data
So basically they all lack google by default, but with different ways to use apps that use google
While I support the continued progress of real Linux phones, have a Pinephone, and even wasted all of yesterday trying to make a working build of Armbian for retro handheld I have; I think it's more practical to focus on open Android distributions, getting more phones out that can support multi os's and buying those, and growing a robust app market system that can compete with Google Play.
F-Droid is almost there, but being open-source doesn't mean something has to be free of charge. F-Droid should be extended, or possibly an additional app manager be established, that still promotes software freedom and privacy, but allows for devs to charge for their apps as well.
Nothing that has or will happen can stop the parts of Android that are already open from remaining open. Yes there will be fewer choices. Yes this means alternative ROM makers will have no choice but to shoulder more of the development burden themselves. And yes this means there's going to be significantly fewer open Android devices and new manufacturers will have to make the intentional effort to make and sell new devices that are free by design - a few of which already exist.
But no matter how many obstacles open Android has, the thing you're ignoring is that it's still in a far better place than mobile Linux. For a start, any device that respects rights enough to be Linux compatible will automatically be compatible with free and degoogled versions of Android as well.
What these growing problems are is a galvanizing call. Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus, and Google were never our friends. Whatever their imperfections, at least Pine64, Purism, BQ, Planet Computers, Murena, Fairphone, F(x)tec, Volla, and SHIFT have sold hardware that was rights respecting by design. We need more companies or other organizations to do that, and we need to choose to buy and promote more devices like that.
And as that happens more, open Android and Linux are going to benefit equally, but there's no getting around the fact that for now and the forseeable future, the open Android variants are still far more mature, far more feature-complete, way closer to the kind of user experience the vast majority of people expect, and far more established.
And again, probably the biggest missing thing we need there is an app marketplace that competes more directly with Google Play, that gives more devs good incentives to want to switch away from Play.
Nothing that has or will happen can stop the parts of Android that are already open from remaining open.
Not really relevant if future development stalls.
the thing you're ignoring is that it's still in a far better place than mobile Linux
The thing you're ignoring is that Linux is continually progressing and improving while Android is regressing.
Whatever their imperfections, at least Pine64, Purism, BQ, Planet Computers, Murena, Fairphone, F(x)tec, Volla, and SHIFT have sold hardware that was rights respecting by design.
The hardware is irrelevant when the software is fundamentally broken.
No, in a lot of ways the open Android roms keep getting better, despite every possible obstacle being thrown in their way. It's easy to make a mature platform sound like it has "stalled", when you're comparing it to alternatives that are still so unusably bad that they have nowhere to go but up.
Do what you want, but get real. If you care more about making your ideals happen, maybe stop debating internet randos so feverishly, and start making pull requests.
Is identity verification for publishing android apps that bad? Both the app store and play store already have your billing information since you have to pay to publish an app anyway right?
Is identity verification for publishing android apps that bad?
What does "that bad" mean? It gives Google ultimate control over what apps you can install on "your" phone. Essentially bringing it on PAR with Apple.
Both the app store and play store already have your billing information since you have to pay to publish an app anyway right?
There are (currently) ways to distribute apps outside of Play Store on Android. So no. I don't even have a Google account anymore for them to associate with my payment information.
It gives Google ultimate control over what apps you can install on “your” phone.
Only if you're using Android, though. It makes sense to me that Google would want publishers of Android apps to be verified, since Google would face backlash if any attacker could publish Android apps anonymously.
...Yeah? That was my point. It's time to move away from Android.
Google would face backlash if any attacker could publish Android apps anonymously.
I don't think you understand. This is the way it's always been, since the beginning of Android.
It may be what Google wants; as a user it is absolutely not what I want. It is not any of Google's business what I install on my device. If they want to provide it as a service and give users the option to opt out of it, I'm totally fine with that. As is, it sure looks like they just want more control, the same way Apple has. I'd be very unsurprised to see Google following in their footsteps in short order and requiring 27% of their income in order to be "verified", or blocking apps that compete with them, or making it so God Damn frustrating that developers just quit, as they have on the Play Store.
Google has continuously faced bad press for having a nearly non-existent quality control for their play store. Apps loaded with malware, or updated to become malware, are super common. The majority will attempt to inject ads every-fucking-where, like press back, SURPRISE AD! Press home, AD TIME! Close the ad, HERE'S AD 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!
since Google would face backlash if any attacker could publish Android apps anonymously.
This is about installing APKs, not apps downloaded from the Play Store. Which, by the way, also have no quality control. Publish a YouTube downloader and it gets taken down in 3 seconds. Make an app to steal people's data, perhaps even steal their money? Literally not an issue.
Google doesn't want you to be able to install a secure open source YouTube client that can ignore ads, or modified apps that can bypass ads they serve that 3rd party app developers put in. They do not give a fuck about attackers getting all your shit. They also don't want you using NextCloud if you could be using Google Drive - so rest assured, Nextcloud fuckery will now continue on APKs too, not just the Play Store verifications.
In all of this, Apple is in some ways better than what Google wants to do - only because Apple makes money off all devices that run iOS. So they don't really care if you use something like NextCloud instead of iCloud - they already made money off you, anything else is a bonus. Of course they do still want to keep you paying for shit and they don't want to be sued by Google for allowing ad-free youtube apps, so they're only marginally better.
Which is fine for their store. But one of the things that used to make Android a more free ecosystem was that you could load apps from 3rd-party sites or stores, including stuff like F-Droid. Some of these apps do things that Google in particular won't like - i.e. circumventing ads/analytics - so having them control who gets signing keys is not good
At this point, the "best" solution might be buying one of those SBC (single board computers) that also has an android image, like orangePi or ODroid and "build" the rest of the phone on top of it. Might be the only way people can get a screen smaller than 6" as well. I say Android in this case because it has access to all the apps without needing emulation or Waydroid
OOOOORRRRR, just buy an used older phone that you know is easy to unlock and install a custom rom. Did that with a motorola G6, am happy with lineage. Not the fastest phone by a long shot, especially as newer versions of many apps just introduce more bloat because fuck you, but perfectly usable for messaging and video watching. Also has a headphone jack!
Yeah this is bad but not even devastating for custom roms like GOS or LineageOS ::: ::: spoiler 2
Samsung, Xiaomi and OnePlus have removed the option of bootloader unlocking on all of their devices. I suspect Google is not far behind.
I highly doubt Google would lock the bootloader, they still make the most friendly devices for custom roms (yes even after all they have done). Also Samsung hasnt acturally allowed custom roms for a while now while Xiaomi doesn't either. ::: ::: spoiler 3
Google implementing Play Integrity API and encouraging developers to implement it. Notably the EU's own identity verification wallet requires this, in stark contrast to their own laws and policies, despite the protest of hundreds on Github.
Even if a developer used the Play Integrity API it doesn't mean custom roms or other operating systems like GOS arent supported. I use GOS and have had no issues with play integrity, there are no incentives to require a certified Android device. ::: ::: spoiler 4
And finally, the mandatory implementation of developer verification across Android systems. Yes, if you're running a 3rd-party OS like GOS you won't be directly affected by this, but it will impact 99.9% of devices, and I foresee many open source developers just opting out of developing apps for Android entirely as a result.
Sideloading isnt going anywhere and tbh I doubt this will be strongly enforced, Google will always have the threat of root resurfacing. You dont even need root to get rid of Google Play services and install MicroG. ::: ::: spoiler Conclusion
Android as we know it is dead. And/or will be dead very soon. We need an open replacement.
That seems highly unlikely, even with everything Google has done the fact is AOSP is the only mature open source mobile project. ::: Now ill get to my issues with mobile Linux: ::: spoiler Hardware As of now there is no good hardware and no plans by any company to make good hardware in the future. ::: ::: spoiler UI Mobile Linux interfaces are at least a decade behind Android, clunky and bearly usable. Btw yes I have tried them recently, they suck. For the most part mobile Linux interfaces are made by developers who would never acturally daily drive them. ::: ::: spoiler Software support Not a lot of Linux software supports arm and those that do either don't work with touchscreens or have them as an afterthought. ::: ::: spoiler UX The software that does work generals isnt designed with small screens in mind and are very often scaled down desktop apps ::: ::: spoiler Basic functionality Basic functionality is absolutely not there on Linux phones, things like calling and texing either require commands or outright dont work at all. For example according to the Postmarketos Wiki in order to change volume on a Pixel 3a during a call you need to manually change it with commands. Genuenly what the fuck, if im on an important call the other person isnt going to wait several hours for me to fiddle with the terminal. If I need to send a text now im not waiting several hours until it works. ::: ::: spoiler Security Mobile Linux has all the security issues as Linux with no mitigations, except phones contain a lot more personal information and are more likley to be a target for data extraction. :::
Samsung One UI removed bootloader unlock officially in latest update. Learn what this change means for custom ROM users, developers, and how it affects Android enthusiasts.
Yeah this is bad but not even devastating for custom roms like GOS or LineageOS
Not yet. It's a concerning trend. It's certainly put a strain on their already-limited resources.
I highly doubt Google would lock the bootloader
...why not?
Also Samsung hasnt acturally allowed custom roms for a while now while Xiaomi doesn't either.
They had unlocked bootloaders. Now they don't. That's all I can say about that.
Even if a developer used the Play Integrity API it doesn't mean custom roms or other operating systems like GOS arent supported.
That's...exactly what that means. That's the entire point.
have had no issues with play integrity
Oh well I suppose if you have no issues, no one else is either? No. You're just not using the apps in question. But once again, it is a concerning growing trend. More and more apps are implementing it.
I doubt this will be strongly enforced
Why would Google lie about this?
As of now
As you might have read in the first sentence of the OP, I was not suggesting installing it now.
My point is that the issues with mobile Linux is so numerous and severe that the timeframe for when the average person could use it is at least seven years or more.
Graphene team already did a blog post about the lock down of AOSP and how it will significantly hinder their ability to support future hardware, since drivers was a huge part of what was moved closed source by google. Those open source drivers was the big driving force for why Graphene basically only supported Pixel phones. They made it significantly harder for people using AOSP derivatives currently to upgrade to a new phone when it is time.
Sure but the GOS team has openly said that even with everything they're still going full steam ahead on Google Pixel support. People thought GOS was going to die but we know now that it was severely overblown.
So what is our alternative? I get that we need to start working on an actual viable open platform, but it seems like the difficulty is mostly hardware and device manufacturers locking the bootloader at this point, isn't it? So is that where we need to go? To make the "Raspberry Pi" of mobile phones?
I'm happy to help, I just don't have the free time to spearhead a whole project.
I got a Sailfish OS last year seeing the writing on the wall already with all the bootloader locking. It’s been bumpy to put it lightly, but at least it has Android apps to help get over the gaping holes of basic missing apps like a halfway decent XMPP client. …But at least native WhisperFish lets you get around the lack of Signal on most non-duopoly platforms.
The problem with them is that they're only available on their respective site. And so they have limited exposure. If they were available at a local store, then the people would notice them. Same with Fairphones, Frameworks and with any brand that is pro-environment.
I’ve been thinking about this and I wonder if Linux can have more success if we have pocket computers that gradually add phone functions instead of trying to have phone hardware work with a system that isn’t made for phone-like experience in general.
What I really hope for is a way to install linux on any mobile device, be it Samsung, Google, One Plus or whatever, like we do with Linux… with linux it doesn’t matter which brand is your laptop… it always works, and if we can replicate that it means true freedom and also it means linux mobile phones are gonna be more fun and broader than desktop computers… cuz everyone uses smart phones.
tl;dr: buy a second hand pixel 8 and install GrapheneOS. It's Android, but it will get you through a few years while you wait for postmarketOS to become viable as a daily driver.
I'm interested in switching to GOS but my main question is regarding photos. Pixel cameras are quite good but mainly because of Google's post treatment of the files. Are the photos still good on GOS?
Yes, GOS's camera app is very good. And if you still don't like it, you can use the proprietary Google camera app, with it's internet connection disabled. In GOS, when you don't give an app internet access, it cannot even connect to local services like Google Play Services, if installed, which is not the case in many other custom ROMs.
I'm probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don't seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I've heard) pretty decently: furilabs.com/
Biggest drawback is it's based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn't worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.
I don't own one, myself, so I can't give any personal experience but I've seen it around for a few years now but most people don't seem to even know about it. Maybe there's a reason for that? But none I've ever seen anyone say.
I've been a mobile dev for many years, I fell in love with the Nokia 810 with maemo which kinda got me started, but I never had one myself. I moved to OpenMoko and saved to buy a Neo. But then Android became big with Google's support and all companies rushing to have an alternative to iOS with the iPhone. Back then when Android meant openness. As much as I loved the openmoko project it had plenty of issues as a daily driver, so eventually I cracked and moved to Android with a Galaxy S2, ah, the innocence back then when one could think Google was actually different... Actually doing good and creating a great Linux phone.
I absolutely agree on all your points. It is time to kill Android as a free/open source idea if it is not dead yet. And you know what, Linux is absolutely ready to substitute anything as a mobile platform. It needs more polishing in terms of UI but Maemo nearly 20 years ago already offered a great UX IMO. Thank you Microsoft and all Nokia management for destroying it.
Now, I say Linux as a mobile platform is ready... But we all know it doesn't lack problems. What are those? The problems come from anticompetitive practices, locked hardware for chips, drivers and so on, specially all related to phone networking. The other main problem is apps which is only a small issue with all the ways there are available to make android apps run on Linux, that is... Until google comes to fuck things up with the points #3 and #4 you make. Those are the biggest threats right now, and it's no wonder Google is doing that. They are preventing the possibility of competition arising. Like I said, I have been a dev for many years, it absolutely sucks the path all tech is taking. But there are solutions, just need to have proper anticompetitive practices and protections... At least in Europe we kinda do, but more needs to be done.
The main point is, Linux as an alternative is kinda ready, if only there was a real posible competition to be had outside of being incredibly rich.
The discussions here are quite passionate so a bit of a reality check :
"PineStore has also discontinued the PinePhone Pro which was talked about in the last recent blog post. TLDR, sales were low". pine64.org/2025/08/16/august_2…
So... people here say they do want one, but clearly not like that one.
Also recently the crowd funding of indiegogo.com/projects/liberux… barely reached 10% of €1,434,375 Fixed Goal with just 135 backers.
So... also clearly not that one either.
So what accelerated development do people not just want to claim they do want, but actually pay for?
Hello RSS users! In this update we announce a new community manager, updates to the PineTab2 and PineNote, FreeBSD on the PinePhone Pro, a guide on upstreaming PinePhone Pro patches and a small bit for you Pinecil users.
I'm likely going to go to t-mobile as they're cheap from what I understand and they make up a big part of the network that google leases, along with (i think) US Cellular, or something similar.
That said, I've got about a year to decide, unless someone decides to hire me and then I can pay my phone off early.
My family just switched from T-Mobile, as they've been jacking up prices lately, and without good reason, considering other carriers have better reception anyway.
I came from Thunder, myself! I loved its big buttons, but it otherwise just didn't have enough features. Check it out; you can always uninstall it if you end up disliking it!
Liking it so far. Is there a way to make the feed images big thumbnails like on thunder? I was looking around and didn't see a setting for that. That's really the only thing I'm not liking so far, everything else seems like an improvement.
A Microsoft glazing botnet leveraging copilot and all of r/linuxsucks training data to shitpost on Lemmy made by a developer who took a Janatorial job at Microsoft to "get his foot in the door" during an internal hackathon he was accidentally invited to.
I hear more complaints about Windows from Windows users than from people who solely or primarily use other OSes. Unless you count “Okay… so why don’t you do something about it?” as a complaint, that is.
Dennis Jones, the leader of Peterborough City Council, made the comments in late-night exchanges with a younger councillor, Daisy Blakemore Creedon.
When she raised concerns about immigration and women's safety, Jones lashed out: "Oh so white British cops fuckingg poor white trash in Rotherham is OK, is it? Get a fucking grip, Daisy."
When I want to tag a post, I often come across the issue of "tagging uncertainty". E.g.
Did I use singular (KungFuMovie) or plural (KungFuMovies) on other occasions?
Did I use 'native' (KurosawaAkira) or Western (AkiraKurosawa) name order?
Have I even used a tag on this topic before, or is it the first time?
In order to check, I:
scroll up or down until I see the top of the community sidebar info
middle-click the link there to the community home page (only available on my own community because I placed one there myself) to open in a new tab
switch from posting window tab to that new tab
scroll down until I see "All community tags"
click on that
look for the tag I'm interested in
go back to the tab with the posting window
write the desired tag
E.g. for this very post, I wasn't sure whether to tag it "tag", "tags" or "tagging". I had to click "Communities", search for "help", middle-click on "Piefed Help", switch to that tab and then look at the tag area to see which form has been used previously.
Some ideas that might make tagging easier:
a "See all community tags" link next to the tags field in the posting window (easy to do?), opens in a new tab or a pop-up
auto-suggest one or more tags once you start typing one in the tag field (hard to do?), like on Mastodon
It's kind of a "wisdom of the crowd" thing. The idea that on average, in aggregate, most of the time, it starts to make sense and be useful. But individual posts are often tagged very "wrongly".
Having said that... For space reasons the tag list in the sidebar is limited to 30 tags and I'm sure there is more we could do to improve the utility of it. Maybe a separate page which has a rotatable tag cloud at the top and below that the list of posts dynamically updates based on whatever is the currently selected tag...
At this point, given their very limited range of usefulness (one-community-only, mods can't add, remove or edit tags on posts, clicking #tag won't find #tags or #tagging, the work required to try to avoid such 'tag splitting', Lemmy users can't add them, Lemmy users can't see them), I'm tempted to just stop bothering with tags altogether.
But then I remember "Search this community" doesn't really work...
:::spoiler jackiechan tag vs "Search this community" for jackie
So if I give up on tagging and community search is broken, what option does that leave for anyone trying to find something in a community? Flairs? Or just plain, old Ctrl+F? (Yes, I've had to resort to this with Piefed, with varying degrees of success.)
(I've already learned to keep an Alex Lemmy page open all the time, so I can do things like search a community.)
So I guess I have to keep tagging if I want Piefed users to be able to ever find anything. And I guess it will still involve me doing all those steps I listed in OP. 🙁 Not exactly a candidate for !piefed_joy@piefed.social
Onno (VK6FLAB)
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Keep your existing phone and OS.
Use it differently. Decide what information you store on it, which applications you install or disable, what permissions you grant and what services you use.
Just installing an OS to "debloat and degoogle" is not ever going to change anything unless you change your habits and you don't need to change OS to do that.
Leaflet
in reply to Onno (VK6FLAB) • • •Onno (VK6FLAB)
in reply to Leaflet • • •OP was talking about Lineage, not Graphene.
If an app doesn't have data it cannot share it.
If you don't install the app, it cannot breach your privacy.
You don't need direct internet access to leak information, for example, an app with access to your calendar has indirect internet access.
Leaflet
in reply to Onno (VK6FLAB) • • •Yes, but you said don't change your OS in general.
True, but that is something stock Android does let you control.
Professorozone
in reply to Onno (VK6FLAB) • • •And what exactly do you use the phone for?
It sounds like you're saying all you need to do to prevent abuse of your device is to not use the device. It can't spy on you if you leave it on the store shelf either.
Autonomous User
in reply to Onno (VK6FLAB) • • •Professorozone
in reply to Onno (VK6FLAB) • • •Zak
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Privacy isn't binary.
LineageOS without Gapps won't send information to Google unless you install something that does. It won't do a whole lot to prevent apps from collecting data like GrapheneOS does so it's up to you to evaluate the privacy implications of anything you install.
A locked bootloader protects against two attack vectors: malware modifying the operating system at runtime, and an unauthorized person with physical access installing a malicious operating system while you're not looking (an "evil maid" attack). The former is rare on Android. The latter is rare unless you're a high-value target or dating an abusive hacker.
Clark
in reply to Zak • • •SatyrSack
in reply to Clark • • •Mugita Sokio
in reply to Zak • • •PragmaticIdealist
in reply to Zak • • •Yeah I know I can't prevent apps from collecting data that's why I have all essentials from FOSS.
My main problem with an unlocked bootloader is I'll have to do a lot of things to get most of my apps working (mainly banking apps and games).
Is that from installing an app or from install a malicious ROM?
That's like impossible. It takes time to install a ROM, and my phone is always with me so that's not happening.
Bold of you to assume I'm ever dating anyone.
Zak
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Getting around Google's attestation with an unlocked bootloader requires root - I believe the go-to is Magisk and the Play Integrity Fix module. It's also a good idea to put the apps in question on the Magisk denylist. I've been using this for years with good results and would not describe it as "a lot of things".
A malicious app could modify the OS, but it would need root permissions. There are three ways that can happen:
A malicious ROM is certainly possible. Some random person's LineageOS fork is slightly less trustworthy than its maintainer (due to supply chain attacks).
PragmaticIdealist
in reply to Zak • • •I'm planning on using KernelSU, because I asked on the Magisk subreddit and it's unironically what they recommended. I looked around here and it solidified my decision even more.
The recommended way for me to install it goes like
install custom recovery > install custom ROM > somehow flash preferred rooting solution in recovery > install preferred rooting solution as an app. linkGitHub - awesome-android-root/awesome-android-root: Discover 400+ best root apps, Magisk/KernelSU/APatch/LSPosed(xposed) modules, and step-by-step guides for every device.
GitHubkrolden
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •PragmaticIdealist
in reply to krolden • • •Ahh, such distant dreams.
I have a way of using a polished official ROM, but it's GSI, and I already have MANY answers as to why NOT use a GSI if possible.
infjarchninja
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Hey PragmaticIdealist
The video guy is talking bollocks: plus he has about 50 crypto links to pay the wanker.
Honestly, I have install lineage since 2018 and installed CyanogenMod way before that.
He talks about "Removing bloatware Google packages" from Lineage, there are no bloatware google packages in lineage.
I have just plugged my oneplus 5T with lineage installed into my laptop, and typed this into my terminal: to give me a list of all the packages installed on my phone.
adb shell pm list packages -s >oneplus5-installed.txt
I have 213 packages installed. THERE ARE NO GOOGLE PACKAGES installed.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Captive Portal is simple to disable using adb. Its not scary.
I have 5 family phones with lineage installed
I have just checked Captive Portal on all 5
db shell settings get global captive_portal_mode
all 5 phones the output is:
null
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
you can change your dns rather than rely on your carriers DNS. I use Mullvad DNS
mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-h…
The eu has public dns servers:
european-alternatives.eu/categ…
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
not much info on itel-p55-5g on xda
xdaforums.com/t/i-want-a-vbmet…
if you want to find out about Lineage, use their forums or use the xdaforums.com/ as above and have a good look around to see what people say.
I want a vbmeta.img and boot.img for iTel P55 5g
suknight (XDA Forums)like this
giantpaper likes this.
PragmaticIdealist
in reply to infjarchninja • • •Really. Most of the videos I've seen of him are really solid. Plus, I do think the tips he gave are good (that's why I linked it in the first place) besides this:
Yeah if you didn't install GAPPS you wouldn't get any, well... Google apps in the first place. Besides this part, I do think the others make sense because they are making connections with Google.
Yeah.
Also I'm wondering about whether to disable this or not, like wouldn't it break functionality?
Yeah I'm also using Mullvad DNS everywhere since I discovered it in like 2024.
Yep, I already looked everywhere. The Sourceforge repo and the Telegram group was all I found.
infjarchninja
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Hey PragmaticIdealist
I dont like him because he seems to intentionally pick controversial subjects just to get clicks.
I mean. how controversial can you get by using the headline "LineageOS is apparently not private?" and then go about trying to prove your point by not referring to Lineage.
I can only assume that loads of non techy people would be put off by his claims.
Lineage does not send any information to google nor connect to google. However the apps you choose to install could connect to google. Especially if you use closed source apps.
if you stick to open source apps via Neostore, droid-ify and F-droid basic you should be fine.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It is safe to disable Captive portal if it is already enabled on your phone.
I have disabled it on my aunts and uncles phones, they dont use lineage or any AOSP roms.
My aunt likes the idea of free wi-fi when shes out. she has a list of all the in-store wifi, in my local shopping centre, already stored on her phone, this means that she automatically connects to whatever wifi she is nearest to.
Lineage phones have captive portal disabled by default.
Looks like you are half way there.
A good VPN is also a good choice
Keep at it.
Autonomous User
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •frongt
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Seefra 1
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •IMO locked bootloader isn't that important as graphene OS devs make it sound, but I would NEVER trust a software "found on telegram".
I have used unofficial lineage OS before, but that phone was just an entertainment machine, with no personal information on it.
Graphene OS however has security features that other ROMs don't have like improved encryption.
However Pixels are too expensive, I can't afford them either. I'm thinking as an alternative getting a Nothing phone cm 1 (or something) which is much cheaper than a pixel and can run official /e/ OS
That Weird Vegan
in reply to Seefra 1 • • •PragmaticIdealist
in reply to That Weird Vegan • • •Yeah it kinda contradicts with my goal, but really, my ultimate goal was just to debloat my phone. I just learned degoogling from learning debloating so I thought I might as well do that. (the debloating plan I had since 2021 has brought me into this deep rabbit hole of privacy, Linux and many many more)
I'd honestly rather use anything than the stock ones at this point.
PragmaticIdealist
in reply to Seefra 1 • • •Yeah when I have the money I'm planning on buying a Poco phone as well. I heard they're good for custom ROMs (as in supported by many devs), and it's the cheapest and good option for custom ROMs.
I think I need to hurry up on that plan though because it looks like I have to do many shenanigans to open HyperOS' bootloader now.
bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame/brands/xiaomi/README.md at main · melontini/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame
GitHubanarchoilluminati [comrade/them]
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •Nothing will be private enough for some people.
There will always be people who will scoff and puff about what is working for you or what works best for you in your attempt to regain privacy. What's important is for you to assess your threat profile, what you want to accomplish, and if LineageOS helps you with that. Just the other day people were scoffing at people buying physical movies and not backing them up in 1-2-3 format. Like, who has the fucking time and energy for that? And it's stupid. It's like scoffing at people who buy books because eventually the binding may fail or the book could get wet so they should've scanned it into a PDF. Or when people scoff at Proton users instead of being glad people are weaning off Google. It never ends and it gets worse the further you go down the hole. Ignore them.
What other options do you have for your phone at the moment besides Lineage? Regular Android? Better off having Lineage.
utopiah
in reply to PragmaticIdealist • • •So... there is what is theoretically possible, what's pragmatically feasible with your current skillset, what you believe you need and what you actually need.
If you rely on what is theoretically possible and what you believe you need you usually end up with burn out.
If you focus on what's pragmatically feasible with your current skillset and what you actually need instead you WILL disappoint strangers on the Internet but you might remain sane and surely will learn something in the process, thus both improve your skillset AND have a better understanding of what you actually need.