I recently bought a new phone, so my old phone, a Pixel 4 xl is now sitting around collecting dust. I thought it could be fun to install an actual non-Google Linux OS on it. Any suggestions?
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Graphene os, I’m typing this on a pixel 4xl with graphene os and its my favorite phone ever
Same with pixel 4
If you consider that the phone is not reilable as a replacement in case of emergency, I can propose you two things:
I keep my old phone in my car and use it as a dedicated media player/GPS that tethers to my active phone when it’s in range.
Also use it for car diagnostics with a Bluetooth obd2 scanner.
Once you’re finished with whatever projects you choose you can donate it to a homeless or domestic violence shelter.
Sell it to me, I want a Pixel.
tor relay definitely 😎
or if you don’t want to bother with that, you can literally just download firefox and install the snowflake extension
You can also use it as pi-hole, there are several projects for this.
I think our suggestion depends on what you want to do or archive, actual use your phone as phone, or as pi-hole, or as emulator … There are so many projects and ideas.
I’d like to continue to use it as a phone.
Then install CalyxOS as its more usable and faster than GrapehenOS.
I use GrapheneOS every day and it’s very pleasant, why would CalyxOS be better?
Because less apps are crippled + better performance + battery lifetime.
I wouldn’t call it “crippled”. The whole point of Graphene is that it has built-in self-checks for security, and of course that would eat into performance.
In real world the argument does not hold since your hardening becomes pointless once it eats all your battery which makes it unusable in the real world. Or your fav apps just do not work.
It was long crippled, and still is, until the developer made the roll backward and started to sandbox google services because he realized that crippling everything is not what people actually want on a daily basis. However, sandboxing is still slower and there is nothing to argue here, is consumes more CPU processing power which automatically reduces battery lifetime as well as pressures resources.
For me usability is crippled if apps crashing, do not work in the first place, so my argumentation is correct.
I use a phone with no google services and I’m fine. I just don’t care about the apps that need them. Plenty of people do the same. And if you need something as utterly invasive as Google services, IMO, the performance hit from sandboxing is the price you need to pay for better privacy. It’s like having a rabid lion in a cage to keep it from destroying everyone you love, but someone complains that the cage takes up too much space and that getting rid of the cage will make the room more usable.
Also, plenty of apps that don’t need Google services. I for one have never missed the ones that do ever since switching to DeGoogled LineageOS, and most of the apps I use are on F-Droid anyway, which aren’t even eligible for using Google services because they didn’t come from the Play store.
Most apps that not depend on Googles infrastructure are very quickly outdated, keyword - dead leftover apps - in the f-droid store and your example does not scale since you compare millions apps vs handful of f-droid apps usually coming already from privacy oriented people and not average developer who copy and paste their app together in the hope to make some money. F-Droid is not even a target because they have no paid app model, so its attractive or attackers to exploit apps since you find no credentials. Play Store is not perfect but offers reasonable compromise and security model if you do not tamper with your phone that break tose features.
All I wanted to say here, and no I do not use GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, I only teste then here and then. Since I think both devs scam their users to make cash out of it with questionable promises. I do not believe in opsec to begin with.
???
I will say most of my apps are from F-Droid and they’re pretty well updated. I wouldn’t discount FOSS out of hand so much, a couple years ago it was pretty bad but the entire ecosystem has really progressed beautifully.
You are delusional I find you 20 apps within seconds that got their last update in 2018.
Delusional is a bit mean, and yeah there’s old stuff but there’s tons of old software on the play store but that doesn’t discount it. What I mean is that although there’s software not updated I’ve encountered and use plenty of F-Droid apps that are updated as often as is needed. I just wouldn’t discount it is what I’m saying
Same here. Yes battery life suffers when running multiple profiles but that is a meaningless argument since any other device would be affected the same. Just don’t keep the second profile running if you’re not using it.
I have seen no other battery life issues with graphene. It is solid.
There is old stuff there which is one of the reasons grapheneos does not directly deliver their apps trough the store, there are many other reasons, you quickly find the reddit thread to that.
I do not need to defend nor shit-talk f-droid, someone else did that for me already, just check my community I linked the f-droid article myself + wrote my own article about f-droid insecurity.
Well that’s just not true in my experience, I use GrapheneOS daily and my battery lasts longer than stock android and I haven’t really encountered any apps I haven’t been able to run under any circumstances. I’m a really big fan of the Google Sandboxing too, it allows me to run the real google-filled apps (like my bank) in a work profile. I admit that might not be lay-user friendly, but idk, it works for me
Stock typically comes with more preinstalled apps, does not scale, the comparison is also lacking since power users quickly can disable those background apps, that people often love to call bloatware. Again knowledge is everything as you can quickly tweaks aosp pretty easily and also get very solid OS.
You can also isolate apps with third-party apps that you even can get from F-Droid, island etc. there plenty… Once again you show knwoledge is key, not the OS.
Cringe.
yggdrasil
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.chronosx88.yggdrasil