I’m looking to get a custom ROM that has good compatibility with my device. Would you recommend /e/? I couldn’t find a tutorial on how to install it with Linux but I don’t think it should be that hard to figure out.
/e/os is often behind on Android monthly security patches (sometimes up to a month or more!) and the apps they fork I have heard also often lag behind upstream. It also doesnt do much to deblob the ROM if proprietary binary blobs.
Comparison table of Android ROMs: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
Came here literally to comment this. Hooooly fuck, I would not trust /e/ as far as I can throw a Fairphone. Good thing they’re compostable, becauze that’s the only up they have on a Graphene flash.
Until I can take a basic actionable step to ensuring my information is safe like LOCKING MY BOOTLOADER… I am good over here.
It’s pretty solid. I use it daily and don’t have any big problems. Install is simple. Just install adb and fastboot from your linux repository. This should cover the most of the installation requirements.
I don’t know if installing from the repositories is such a fantastic idea. I’ve had instances where I’ve almost fucked up a device because I installed the ones from the repositories and they weren’t new enough. I would recommend downloading the ones from Google directly.
Edit: the cli platform-tools
Sounds like either a terrible bug or user error. Which in both cases should be fixed.
Sounds pretty straight forward. What is compatibility like? Have you tried any banking apps?
Their easy installer is why many people I know installed it, but it only supports 21 devices and mine wasn’t one of them, so I can’t say much about usability or security. If yours is one of them, there’s also a Linux guide on their website: https://doc.e.foundation/easy-installer
I love the idea of the easy installer.
looks at GrapheneOS installer… Literally just 3 buttons on a Website you have to click, all of the steps easily written with clear instructions for Linux as well as windows
looks at /e/ installer
- finds 5 Websites with installers for /e/, all of them apparantly official ones, decided to use https://e.foundation/installer/
- Site dosent let you view this instructions without JavaScript.
- enabled JS
- Cant even use fcking Firefox to view this installer because a fcking pop-up Blocks my sight
- goddamn privacy oriented Android Rom Website recommends using Microsoft edge or Opera (both of which are privacy nightmares, especially opera)
- smashes pillow against the wall
I give up. If you call that bloated peace of dierrhea an „Easy installer”, you could just as well say that gentoo is easier to install than mint.
I know that GrapheneOS is really easy to install. Problem is that I don’t have a Pixel.
I’ve used it for almost five years, flashed it myself on my FP3. I disabled microG and I’m very careful & strict about what I install on my phone, also their Advanced Privacy set of tools is pretty good. For my threat model is more than enough and I am very happy overall. Never had any serious issues, or even mildly serious ones tbh, despite people yelling about Android security updates arriving late. There was an outage in their cloud services in October that required a complete revamping of their server infrastructure and that took months but I don’t use their cloud so I wasn’t affected at all.
Here is a good comparison. As a reminder, there is no privacy without security, so if you live in the US (or anywhere that illegal searches happen regularly), I’d argue a less secure solution is by definition a less private solution.
Basically, but not everyone has a pixel or can afford to buy a new device.
if you got pixel and don’t like GOS team, Calyx OS is a decent alternative also, you can lock bootloader and get most apps to work with microg
GOS team are some elitist jerks, sure, but what they make works well. And I respect the fuck out of Calyx for being committed to making something like MicroG work.
GOS or Calyx, either is gonna be miles better than /e/. /e/ is running their ‘native IP scrambler’ on a two-year old commit of TOR. Fuck everything about that.
It’s dangerous to get too obsessed with trying to secure everything against state actor level threats. It’s not that hard to dramatically increase your privacy if you’re currently using a regular android phone. Sure, yes, more security is better, but a single individual’s private information isn’t actually that valuable. It only becomes valuable to exploit people at a massive scale. Even just putting up minor speedbumps to data collection can massively increase your privacy as long as you aren’t being individually targeted, and more people getting into caring about their privacy is a good thing. Any de-googled android rom is already a big step in that direction. Lets not let perfect be the enemy of good.
If OP was trying to secure themselves against interest from conventional state actor like a large intelligence service, I’d say they probably need to throw their phone in a woodchipper and start hitchhiking to the nearest professional spy training program.
More realistic concerns that an ordinary person probably has are casual mass surveillance and local police fuckery. Random AOSP Roms are not sufficient to handle either of those threats.
They’re actually pretty good at protecting you from casual mass surveillance as long as you don’t do anything stupid with them, that was the whole point of my post. It’s just not profitable to spy on you if they have to bother to put any effort into it.
I also think you’re overestimating the capabilities of most local police. When I said state level actors I wasn’t just talking about the NSA. Smaller countries, actual US states, or even some big cities would be included there, but your local small town police department wouldn’t even know where to start. If you plan on personally pissing off any of those bigger police agencies then you should really just be assuming no phone is safe. Otherwise you’re not likely to run into anyone that even knows what de-googled android is, let alone how to get into it.
