Does anyone know how /e/os compares to graphene os for privacy? I am thinking of getting a murena fairphone which comes with /e/os but supports custom OSs and am leaning towards graphene, but don’t know much about e.
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I stopped using /e/OS last year and switched to CalyxOS.
The problem I had comes probably from the fact that /e/ tries to cover as many phones as possible (almost 230 as of now) without having a big enough testing pool, so stuff would break constantly even on the “officially supported” devices. And when you pointed out your problem on their forum, the answer you met was frequently something like “the problem is in your phone model, we can’t do a lot about it”.
Calyx instead supports only Pixel phones and a couple others, including the FP4, it’s always tested for good (they have both a stable and a beta branch you can easily switch between) and their android and microG versions are usually more up to date.
Oh, and the Calyx community is one on the nicest and most helpful on the planet
Love that there is a post about /e/OS!!!
After years of “degoogling” my phones, been rocking a Oneplus 6t (love this phone) with several OS’s, but found /e/OS one night and haven’t looked back.
I prefer computers to be more no nonsense and I thought that /e/OS pushed their own cloud solutions and stuff a lot. Has that been annoying for you or are they reasonable about it or am I wrong about this entirely?
Perhaps we have different needs but I’m trying to get away from my @gmail.com account. Having an alternative built into my phone (email, pictures, calendar, writer, spreadsheets and others) synced across devices as well as my computer, sounds good to me.
It is only 1gb of space, but as of now, plenty of space for my pictures. To some point, makes me not hold TONS of pictures on my phone as I delete the ones I don’t want. Can desync if needed
For additional space, yes its kinda expensive. I have a proton account as well and beard good things about them. Its just not baked into my OS
I run /e/OS on my FP5. I like it a lot, I don’t know much about the technology though so I can’t tell it how it compares privacy wise. I am just happy that I get to run a phone without any Google/Apple involved. I use mostly f-droid apps and if I would really need something from the Play store I could access that through /e/'s App Lounge
FP5? Is that a typo or did I miss something?
Fair phone, perhaps?
Yes but the 5 hasn’t launched yet to my knowledge.
You’re correct. It was a typo 😅
In general I have the impression that GrapheneOS focuses more on security and a bit less on privacy.
Those are almost the same thing. If your private data isn’t secure then you don’t have privacy, and if your secure data isn’t private, it isn’t secure.
In theory you can willingly and securely share your data with an entity to track you. In practice GOS recommends to use Vanadium because it is more secure. But it doesn’t have the same possibilities regarding add-ons and cookie handling as Mull. GOS recommends to use the sandboxed PlayStore because it is more secure than F-Droid. But how do I get then some privacy respecting app alternatives like NewPipe. Also things like giving Seedvault less permissions make it more secure but less useful for a complete backup. Or not to implement a unified location provider (using privacy respecting local and Mozzilla backends) makes it harder to determine your location indoors.
I ran /e/os on my Fairphone 4 for a while. Wasn’t a fan of the clearly iOS-inspired launcher or the outdated Android version, so I switched to Iodé, which delivers a more Android-y experience. The built-in, system-wide ad-blocker is great, but recently they added a “premium” model that allows for more rigorous blocking. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
You could also take a look at Ubuntu touch, which updated about a month ago, with improved support for the Fairphone 4.
Upcoming soon is a rework of the launcher. No details or screenshots but its something
Good thing about android is the custom launchers. I’m on /e/OS using the Olauncher.
Yea, I used some vanilla clone for a while, since they use the original app ID for their launcher, which prevents you from installing the original vanilla launcher. Really bad style.
Later used Nova for a while, but when they started lagging behind official updates I switched to Iodé, which didn’t and also supported the device before vanilla LineageOS, which Iodé is based on, did.
Check DivestOS, it uses a lot of things from GrapheneOS + they have crrated their own security tools and applications.
I use still their Mull browser, even since switching to Graphene
Thats the spirit of Open Source!! :))
Graphene do not support fairphone, but you can use calyxos, which supports fairphone (with verified boot?), and it is more up to date.
In general, I think calyx is probably more up-to-date and secure, with vanilla android experience. /e/ has its own unique athetics, and a SSO cloud service powered by nextcloud (last time I checked, nextcloud dont have good E2EE support, so I personally avoid putting my stuff on a nextcloud server hosted by others. But it is your choice)
Yeah, looking at their (e) marketing they seem to have a lot of cloud stuff which makes me trust it less. I will probably go with calyx.
Kuketz did a great review of all these roms.
Is there an english version?
I just run the link through google translate.
Bit outside of the scope of your question, but CalyxOS is a graphene-like android distro but for more devices.
I personally use calyx os and am pretty happy with it, they have a fairphone build
Graphene only supports Pixel phones. You could try to port over the device tree, HALs, and build system changes from LineageOS, but you would have to maintain it all yourself and run your own builds. Im using a pixel and I really enjoy graphene, but I’m not sure if it’s worth that much effort
Isn’t graphene exclusive to pixel phones? (Phones by google)
Yes (it doesn’t matter)