**Wanted to update this post with a website I found that has info about this topic for regular people, in case anybody finds this later. ** Privacy Focused OS For Everyone It has info about the different os options as well as apps for phones using regular android.
Pretend I am five and please be nice.
Say I want to free my phone and tablet from samsung/google/skynet but I neeeeeed to be able to use my printer and external cd drives and their silly proprietary apps, as well as flash drives, cds, and normal apps without alternatives like bandcamp and libby and and all that. I also need to be able to use government websites and use my wifi and pay bills and just generally do everything that I do now on samsung’s/motorola’s software.
(Most of these things were issues for me when I tried to use linux years ago which is why I’m listing them. I do not possess the technical ability to solve these problems on my own when they come up. I also do not possess any other devices to use if my main ones can’t do these things anymore.)
Is this realistic in 2024 for Graphene or any other free open source os? And if it is, how do I install it safely and properly?
Are there any known issues with it like slowness or not being able to use the camera, etc? Most of the places with information about this stuff are not written in a langauge I speak.
Edit: does anyone want to work on creating or collecting some simplified tutorials with me? I’m thinking of installing one of these on my phone and it it goes well I will probably write the details down. It might be good to have a place for other people who have done so, or want to, to do the same for their respective devices.
Honestly, I’m with you - I’ve had people here even get indignant about how “easy it is” to install and use. Yet I have never seen someone here share clear, simple instructions. The official install instructions have phrases like “high quality standards compliant USB-C cable” or “Get a carrier agnostic device” or “4th and 5th generation Pixels only show the first 32 bits of the hash so you can’t use this approach.”
How do I know if my USB-C cable is compliant? How do I make sure my device is carrier agnostic? Hash? I know for most people here, these are trivial questions, but they are opaquely technical for 99% of the people out there. That’s fine, by the way - there is nothing wrong with a quality OS meeting the needs of a hobbyist community with the technical know-how to use it. Just don’t pretend that it is not a niche OS or that it is simple and user-friendly. I say this without any criticism, just as a basic reality check.
PS, in case it was not obvious, please do not answer the example questions. I know that they have answers and that many people here have that knowledge at hand. They are examples of just a few issues that require a base technical knowledge that not everyone possesses.
My partner is trying to break into open source and I keep suggesting that she tries to focus on making and producing quality documentation for existing projects.
Documentation on most projects sucks donkey balls and if you aren’t used to reading through 16 seemingly unrelated forum posts before you even start, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Seems like a bad idea unless she’s very familiar with the projects she would help document. Documentation is notoriously not something that can be produced by a newcomer, because it requires experience that a newcomer doesn’t have.
I guess the best way for a newcomer to help would be to try to use the product and ask every little question they have to make sure they receive the correct answers and context and, at the end of the process, enough knowledge would be gained to contribute at least one piece of documentation. But the bulk of the knowledge would still come from people that already know the product, so in terms of efficiency it’s way worse than having the authors write it.
Of course, if the authors are unwilling or unable to write good (or any, even) documentation, having someone that has the will to gather the scattered information into a central place and work on it so it’s digestible and high quality is still unbelievably useful.
But yeah, my point being that documentation is far trickier than it seems as far as open source contributions go.
They say a carrier unlocked phone is recommended because carrier locked phones often disable the option to OEM unlock your phone in the Developer settings.
Well, you see, now we are having a conversation about the difference between “carrier unlocked” and “carrier agnostic,” which only seems to prove my point.
I’m not a person who had previously done much messing around with their phone but I have installed Linux on several computers. I put graphene on my phone nearly a year ago and I recall the process being fairly straightforward. I think I just followed the instructions on their website.
Maybe it’s not an “any idiot could do it” level of user friendliness but the examples you’ve listed as stumbling blocks aren’t exactly brain-busters.
The graphene install docs is in your language and will walk you through the install process. Their support page points you to discord, telegram, matrix support channels as well.
https://grapheneos.org/install/
https://grapheneos.org/contact#community
As a general rule anyone that asks for a non-proprietary thing that will do everything their proprietary thing does without alternative solutions allowed is so far from the reality of non-proprietary software in a proprietary world that they can not be made happy so I’ll leave the support of that to others.
There is a lot of mixed information out there about whether or not non-proprietary things have ‘caught up’ in usability for the average person. Thanks for the feedback.
Some things are less important than you might think. A slave doesn’t worry about paying rent or buying new tools. So is slavery a useful convenient solution. The exploitation has a hook. Some people like living in the matrix.
Graphene has google play junk. I don’t touch it, but it is there.
Good to know. Thanks.
One thing to consider is Graphene and Calyx both say they are designed to work on Google Pixel phones. If you have a different kind of phone you should search on your phone model and see if anyone has installed those on it and how it went for them.
Other than that, they are basically just de-googled Android so I would expect the things you mentioned to work. You can get many apps from Fdroid or use the Aurora client to get them anonymously from the Google store, though I don’t know for sure if that works in all circumstances. My brother uses Calyx and I know he has been able to install at least one proprietary app (for his car) and I think one from an insurance company or something like that.
edit: update, I just checked the CalyxOS site and it says they also support Motorola moto and the Fairphone.
Thank you!
I found the instructions on the website to be completely adequate.
https://grapheneos.org/install/web
You’ll still be able to use Google Play and the apps found there, if you want to. I’d heard of people having trouble with banking apps. I access my bank using their website, not an app.
Just understand going into this that the priority is privacy, not compatibility. Maybe keep your old phone around in case there’s some must-have app that doesn’t work but you need occasionally.
To elaborate on this answer, I found the performance with graphene to be really subpar.
I know it’s supposed to be exactly the same in terms of speed, but that was not my experience.
If You find the performance of your device to be inadequate now you may wish to upgrade first.
I don’t have any complaints about the performance of graphene on my pixel 7a but I don’t do much outside of texting and browsing webpages. I also get about 3 days of battery life out of a charge.
First off? Do you have a current Pixel phone?
Because GrapheneOS is only available for Pixels, and current ones at that. I’m still on a Pixel 4a, and GrapheneOS considers my phone end-of-life and support for it will eventually stop. So unless you just got a brand new Pixel… kind of a waste.
Secondly, since you’re less tech savvy, you’ll probably want to use the official installation via WebUSB but as a point of warning, Firefox purposefully chooses not to use WebUSB or WebSerial because of security risks.
Google built WebUSB and WebSerial because Chromebooks are a useless fucking joke of a computer without them, since it doesn’t have a real OS, and just a glorified web browser. This is fuckstupid, pathetic, and absolutely a security risk.
That being said, the WebUSB install is definitely going to be the “easier” path for you, but you’ll be forced to use Chrome to do it.
Are there any known issues with it like slowness or not being able to use the camera, etc?
No idea, I always went LineageOS because it supports more devices, has better support for Google services, and isn’t quite as obsessive about privacy. Unlike GrapheneOS, updates for devices will come as long as maintainers are able to make new versions of Android run on older hardware. With LineageOS, I’m looking at likely years of security updates for my Pixel 4a.
…and GrapheneOS considers my phone end-of-life and support for it will eventually stop. So unless you just got a brand new Pixel… kind of a waste.
Hard disagree. Just because it stops receiving updates doesn’t suddenly make it useless
Thanks for all this detail, I appreciate it!
make sure to consider calyx too.
Alas, it looks like none of the devices I own right now are actually compatible with Calyx, graphene or lineage right now. :( I own less popular models of devices, but I erroneously thought any android device would be interchangeable here when I first made this post.
For LineageOS at the very least, you might be able to find an unofficial ROM for your device over at XDA developers forums. There are often ones built for less popular phones, but they don’t have as much frontline support as the supported devices listed on the LineageOS site.
https://xdaforums.com/f/lineageos-questions-answers.6082/
…but it’s exactly as I said earlier. There are technical walls to scale, including whether or not you even have access to the right hardware to start the process to begin with. It sounds like you learned a bunch today, which is good, and hopefully you can either find an unofficial ROM that works for you, or you can eventually invest in a phone that fits one of the ecosystems that you would like to pursue.
Good luck!
Gotcha. This is a valuable clarification. Thanks!!
I have an unlocked galaxy s21 ultra and was considering giving it new life with a new OS but the amount of “don’t brick your Samsung” and “galaxy phones aren’t compatible with custom roms” put me off. Not sure what to do either
I have a moto g 5g 2023 which is apparently different than the moto 5g, and an A9+ tablet. I found a thread talking about the difference and some regional reasons why my phone and others like it don’t always have support. It looks like versions of these OSes often just don’t exist for a lot of devices, because fewer people use them. The lineage website did have a lot of samsung devices listed though and might have yours, so there definitely are some options. But it’s not every phone, which sucks, but i think the warnings about bricking are real and not just discouragement.
Honestly opening up software on consumer devices should be the law and mayyybe one day it will be in the us (eu allowed some semblance of alternative app stores recently and that’s something? ) but I think those of us with the less common and budget mobile devices might just have to wait for now. Or continue living inside the matrix, as someone else here said.
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I’ve installed a lot of things that say they work fine that don’t, and I’ve followed a lot of ‘simple’ instructions that were not simple to me. I made this post to ask people about their actual experiences and get feedback from people about things I might not have thought of myself.
This forum is called no stupid questions.
I hear ya most online instructions suck
We need an ecosystem of nontechnical tech forums for the rest of us. Real ‘define every term’ hours. I would start this if I knew enough.
The real problem with Lemmy’s tech communities/users is a lot of us having been living in Linux-land for decades and some folks are cranky about having to come out of their caves and help folks who, in their eyes “won’t help themselves.” A lot of them came here to try to find the early internet they lost from their youth, and they don’t want the corporations or people who they might consider corporate muckity mucks here (I mean, I get it, I feel it, too, I don’t want corporations here).
It’s a bad attitude, because not everyone is born with/able to grow that specific technical skill level which encompasses research, understanding, and application of computer science.
I agree, as someone with a bit of a higher level of skill here, we really really do need “define every term” hours because these are devices that everyone has to have in their daily lives whether they like it or not, and they deserve a level of understanding of the things they purchase and own, and they don’t deserve to be mocked for not already knowing or not knowing where to start.
One of the things my old professor used to tell me that the biggest skill in the tech industry is actually being able to do your own research, read documents, make sense of them, and put them into practice. The reality is that this is a skill that is developed deeply over a lifetime and not everyone chooses to max out that skill. We all have limited time and resources and the world still needs hairdressers, doctors, and all kinds of professions where they have spent way more time learning their profession than learning computers. They don’t deserve to be looked down on for simply investing their skills in things they’re actually good at.
Cheers and I really hope you find the info you need here.
I think a lot of people deep in linux and computer science communities might not realize that tons of people outside that subculture feel exactly the same way they do and want the same things, we just didn’t go to school for it. No one is trying to water down the niche spaces that are important to people or deny the hard work that was done by people in decades past. We just want to understand and do what’s been recommended to us, and information should be for everyone because the goal is increased adoption and digital freedom in society, right? Anyway this kinda means a lot coming from a person with your background so thank you.
You’re welcome, I have been lucky enough to be around a lot of people with an attitude like mine, which is how I got my knowledge to begin with, as well. If it hadn’t been for open minded people being willing to help, I would have never achieved the level of knowledge I have today. I stand on the shoulders of giants who were kind and giving enough to bend down and share knowledge.
No one is trying to water down the niche spaces that are important to people or deny the hard work that was done by people in decades past.
Exactly, the gatekeeping isn’t helping anybody. The fact that things don’t work perfectly on their own and just aren’t as polished in the open source world gatekeeps people on its own, without the actual knowledgeable people also gatekeeping.
Isn’t it enough that the knowledge is esoteric enough to do the gatekeeping for us already? Why do we need to gatekeep when there’s technical walls to scale to begin with!
Come on man, is this how you’d explain it to a 5 year old?
Ok, grumpy bear.
