Its always good to try!
How come Linux worked on desktop but on phones it is having such a hard time even tho Android has the linux kernel( i think).
Is PC hardware more open and known to everyone about everything while mobile dosent? And if that is the case then why arent phone opening itself for support?
Because ARM is a fucking mess. Each device has it’s own way of booting. There’s no standard like UEFI or BIOS.
Plus you need propreitary code for modem to support 2G, 3G, 4G…etc. which are complicated to implement.
Would that be a good focus? To get a unified standard for ARM developed to get many devs together to make software/OS’es for it and adapt phones to use those OS’es
so, Linux does work, a lot of stuff works. There is nothing fundamentally different about phones other than them basically all running on ARM instead of x86, which is more common for PCs. More development of stuff for X86 Linux than ARM Linux, although less of a difference than there use to be.
Really the issue is proprietary stuff built on top of android and IOS. Stuff that a lot of useful apps rely on for security and functionality. For instance banking apps are super locked down for obvious reasons, but the standards that have been adopted by the industry for mobile banking are all entangled with proprietary close source stuff.
Samsung, no. Samsung can’t be trusted with anything. That would be like using Tor on Android.
Plus Odin is a pain to work with as you have to rely on leaked tools (Odin3 for Windows and Odin4 for Linux) to do anything official.
Fairphone do work with Ubuntu Touch.
Wait really? Ooo I have to check that out. Thanks!
A Fairphone with GrapheneOS would be the tops
GrapheneOS doesn’t like Fairphone very much it seems…
what led you to this conclusion?
Hmmm, maybe something like this: https://www.androidauthority.com/fairphone-murena-software-response-grapheneos-claims-3579637/
Isn’t /e/os (murena) a seperate company from fairphone?
Yes, and I don’t know if it could even be classed as a collaboration. They just buy them and resell them with different firmware, basically?
I assume some part of acceptance is required for that in practice, but it isn’t like Fairphone ever advertised them as an official option (as far as I can tell or saw).
Well, Fairphone sells phones with e/OS preinstalled on their website so at the very least they like each other
So instead of seeing an opportunity to do the same, they burned bridges with one of the only companies not locking down their OS?
the graphene people never fail to stir pot. lol
they not wrong, but there’s better ways to inform other people.
They are just saying that e/OS has delays of important updates that lag. Which the fairphine team then pretty much confirmed.
Am I a dick for pointing out factual information? Are they? When it comes to something like security and privacy there should be no compromises. The truth should be heard.
Sure would be the toppiest of tops!
We can encourage them to work together in their official communication channels too!
Would be good for both of them on every level. GrapheneOS learning to make their own phones, and Fairphone learning to make an OS while both being partnered
Edit: Be the change you want to see everybody!! Flood the gates with what we want!
Graphene already has a partnership with Motorola now so the assumption is some time (I’ve seen 2027 speculated) we may get a Graphene Phone from Motorola. Mixed feelings about them partnering with a company like that but we’ll see how it goes. I still keep thinking about finally getting a secondhand pixel 10 so I can switch to Graphene from apple.
I would recommend it. Very worth it overall (As a user of a similar Pixel phone)
What are your use cases?
Fairphones are scams
In what way(s)? There are a lot of things I like about it from the research I did. I only didn’t get one because of e/OS and the battery life.
It 👏 should 👏 be 👏 the 👏 law 👏 .
I don’t know how they managed to sneak locking a system to a single boot loader. And what about Qualcomm chips? They have a hypervisor OS, you say? A small operating system that can read all your memory? Updated as firmware?
Great, forcibly open source that system as well and tell them once and for all that they can fuck off. No, you don’t get to control another persons property - you disgusting goblin.
Either that, or ban the sale of such devices permanently across Europe.
That too! I covered that in another of my recent posts on the Europe community on here
That is a big thing Europe can at least make happen and in Asian/African/Latin countries too.
I like your addition though that is all facts!! Let’s keep pushing countries to make that happen.
To make them undo what Google is trying to do currently and what Apple does for long time to have all those devices be fully changeable for the OS
Needs to become a movement everywhere!!! Just as StooKillingGames, and the KeepAndroidOpen movements
We need a catchy name for it
Can you give me some reading on this? I am happy to make noise about an issue once I understand it.
There’s a lot of writing and history behind open source, open firmware and even open hardware, but the BIGGEST thing you can focus on is the transition from PCs to smartphones around the 2000s.
We went from you installing whatever boot loader and operating system that could run on your device, to a locked down boot loader that would only load the vendors operating system.
They hide behind security through obscurity, but it’s been debunked. The boot loader and even firmwares of devices have in certain cases been found to be gushing gashes of CVEs and bad coding - but only through decompilation and reverse engineering. In fact, after the 5 year warranty of your device is up, you should consider the security of your device highly suspect.
The true purpose for an exclusive locked down boot loader is to maintain operating system monopoly, force uninstallable apps/services on a user, to then be able to track & canvas the user to sell on the data brokerage market - not to mention planned obsolescence, because if you can’t freely modify and update your firmware and/or boatloader, you could secure it for more than 5 years.
For a more balanced take and to see “both sides”, read this
Other than that, the LibreBoot mailing list will help you to unearth the hypocrisy and lies fed to us by hardware vendors.
Free the firmware, free the bootloader, free the operating system, free the drivers, free the software - and then the user can decide wether or not they want to run commercial software on top of all this.
Anything else is subservience.
Thanks for this, I am interested in the philosophy around FOSS, I am tech illiterate basically and like foss because I trust it more than US tech.
Hardware should be software agnostic
And the other way, too. The whole reason why Android chose Java was because it was, at the time, one of the better languages and runtimes for creating hardware-agnostic software. Now that a software ecosystem is in place, why should Google be able to control what hardware the already-written software runs on?
Very true. Covered that in my post on Europe
It was very disappointing to find out that GOS was incompatible with every phone brand but one. It is coherent with the Zeitgeist: why care about security and privacy when users will dump all their information in Google and Facebook?
That’s borderline with the purity fallacy: that one should not deserve privacy and security because of one or more bad practice.
I believe not so many people give away “everything”, and many more probably don’t realize how much they give.
There are many reasons one would keep a FB account, or a Google account around. That does not mean that person abandoned all rights on privacy and even less on security.
And how would you recommend a soft transition if you’re in a all-or-nothing approach? One day on Google, FB, what’s not, and in an instant: new device, new OS, drop everything at once? Nearly no one will do that.
The reason GOS does not support more devices is not because of where other brands vs privacy and security, it’s a pure hardware requirements they don’t meet. If the Motorola devices are a commercial success, most likely other phone makers will be interested.
the Motorola devices are a commercial success, most likely other phone makers will be interested.
That’s not going to happen because Samsung earns more selling private data than selling phones
I wasn’t counting on Samsung. Indeed: Samsung already meets all the criteria to support GOS, but they cripple their phone upon alternative OS installation.
There are other phone makers left.
Fairphone? perhaps. Samsung? hell naw. Samsung heavily benefits from the spyware it builds into One UI and 99% of its user base do not care about the spyware.
But I do hope hope that Fairphone begins to embrace Linux support.Samsung heavily benefits from the spyware it builds into One UI and 99% of its user base do not care about the spyware.
They go out of their way to ensure that it cannot be disabled even if you do care about the spyware and try to uninstall or disable it.
Per GOS: Samsung has almost all hardware requirements to support GOS except… they purposely cripple their device upon installation of a third party OS. One can only suspect they indeed make money with their spyware stack!
What is the bottleneck holding Fairphone back from supporting Linux fully?
Qualcomm
The idea that the Major Software Enshittificator which is Samsung would ever go along with this is incredibly naive.
Samsung was one of the first to fill their smartphones and tables with tons of useless “Samsung” software that can’t be removed by normal means, and even people who had their older and less insanely stuffed with junk devices got them forcefully filled with that crap via updates (making their older devices unusable, “incentivizing” them to get new ones).
Samsung hasn’t been consumer friendly for at least a decade.
When smartphones became a thing, everyone had Samsungs. I played around on a classmate’s Samsung Galaxy Whateverthefuck (might’ve been a Gio or a Y) and in addition to the hardware itself being shit because it was a low-end device in like 2010 or 2011, the software was HORRIBLE. So I vowed never to buy a Samsung and I still haven’t. Maybe their software got good, maybe it didn’t… But my first smartphone was an Xperia and the one after that was the second-gen Moto G. Quite stock-like Android and that’s what I’ve preferred since (though I’m now on iOS, but that’s a different story)
I remember the GrapheneOS team saying that they won’t bring their OS to Fairphone, because the Fairphones don’t bring hardware support for security measures the GrapheneOS team doesn’t want to compromise on.
Definitely feels like a supply chain issue on parts for Fairphone to have this position. Hopefully Fairphone, GrapheneOS, and hardware venders can work this out on a later model.
Both tantalizingly close with respect to GrapheneOS. I wouldn’t expect Samsung to ever support the other two, but their phones are supposed to have every security element GOS expects. Only problem is that Samsung wants to make their own walled-garden ecosystem a la Apple.
I do remember reading somewhere that GrapheneOS are open to someone making a GSI (generic system image) port that would work with phones like Fairphone, which GOS don’t want to officially support due to a lack of security features. I wonder if anyone has started work on such a thing.
Samsung? They will not give a shit it huge corp
That’s true but you never know maybe in future they will. Definitely don’t see them doing it now. It would definitely be a hop on the wagon moment for them
If there’s enough pushback, they’ll eventually either do it or they’ll die.
I have a newer Pixel phone and I’m comfortable installing and running custom ROMs from doing so regularly back in the day - for those who’ve daily driven both, what are the reasons I should NOT switch from the stock OS to GrapheneOS?
You can’t use Google Wallet to pay with NFC, they don’t have Miracast, and Chromecast can supposedly work but I haven’t been able to get it to work. Those are the three major hurdles I’ve found, but getting away from Google was a priority so I’ll live without them.
NFC can have other providers other than Google Wallet, but I haven’t found any that I find trustworthy enough yet. Supposedly the EU is making an alternative.
I think this is about what I’ve heard to date on drawbacks, by as you mentioned, I think I’ll take the chance for the privacy benefits.
The EU already has alternatives, quite a few banks have their own NFC implementations.
Fair. Unfortunately, mine don’t.
OEM’s
Or just OEMs, even.
Ya. Short term Motorola for Graphene, long term any that support postmarketos
The short term is forked android. The long term is a Linux distribution, new or otherwise. It doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that the proprietary blobs in Android will get reverse engineered.
That will definitely be the focus. If Europe people can mandate making Android and Apple Ecosystems be opened to having real GNU/Linux or anything else they want to be able to be put on it then that would make huge changes to getting that to happen
