Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwawaygulf 1929 days ago
Get a Pixel 3/4 and throw GrapheneOS on it: https://grapheneos.org/

It's the best non-Google, privacy enhanced experience you can get at the moment.

4 comments

The offers of GrapheneOS and /e/ are very different. /e/ targets to be a usable alternative to a google-owned software, which includes for instance cloud storage and backup, access to third party proprietary apps, etc. While GrapheneOS is harder to use, but it does provide much better security hardening.
hey there phh; slightly tangential, but: What are your plans for phh-treble? To be honest, if you've got the bandwidth, I'd love for you to start something comparative to /e/ and CalyxOS.

With Generic Kernel Images (and APEX to an extent), do you see phh-treble likely replacing LineageOS as the preferred base for projects like /e/? Merci.

My goal for Phh-Treble remains the same, which is provide a good basis for a pure unmodified AOSP with good hardware support, so that other people can make whichever ROM they want with it. As such, I'm saddened that many ROMs, including /e/ still doesn't officially provide GSIs...

I haven't had a good look at either /e/ or CalyxOS, but /e/ looks like they are too focused on the marketing for my taste, /e/ really isn't known to be a contributor in term of source code to the community, their only contribution is bringing users (I do have a bit of respect for that). CalyxOS has nice things, it is much closer to what I'd want than GrapheneOS. CalyxOS tries to makes features closer to what you can get on a "standard" google-owner Android, and they are definitely a great value to the community, like SeedVault is a really nice addition for de-googlizing one-self. I feel that CalyxOS goes too much into security, while privacy/data-owning are already very nice features, and they restrict their user-base because of that.

I doubt that GKI would help phh-treble replace LineageOS. First, I'm happy there are LineageOS GSIs based on my work :-) But the real reason LineageOS persist is that most users want a ROM tailored for their own device. Sure one of the biggest real issue of phh-treble is the lack of security upgrade of the kernel, but from my experience discussing with many people asking me for device-specific ROM, the reason they want device-specific ROMs is really about feelings.

Most users feel a device-specific ROM will be more optimized. (no they are usually not Gentoo users). Usually they'll come to me with "hey, you have this feature that works on my device in GSI, but not in my device-specific ROM, could you help fix it?", when I ask why not just use my GSI, the answer goes with optimization, and the obvious answer is "It's so much more optimized that hardware features doesn't even work.".

Wow, I don't see that often, but when I tried (several times) to go to that link I get:

    Gah. Your tab just crashed.
In Firefox (85.0.1 on Ubuntu 18.04). Works fine in Opera, though, and it looks like just a wall of text so I'm not sure why FF would be unhappy.
Wow indeed, same here. I don't recall seeing that for a very long time, if at all. FF85 on Ubuntu 16.04 x64
I haven't had any crashes, but I've had more and more sites not work with Firefox. The payroll site I use for my small business is the most annoying one, I have to switch to Safari to run payroll.
Had Firefox updated and needed a restart? I get that crashed message on xubuntu 20.04 when opening a link in a new tab. Every time it confuses me for a moment then I remember why.
Firefox Developer, worked fine for me.
Works for me on firefox nightly on linux.
Firefox 86 Win 10 — works fine.
This is the way. From another happy grapheneos user, and project sponsor.
Giving money to google to deGoogle yourself is an odd angle.
Not giving Google a few hundred dollars (or if you buy a used phone, $0) isn't going to hurt them.
Google privacy is 0%, security is high 90s%
There is no security in google products except for google. They are all remote code execution platforms.
Without Google Play Services, this is blatantly untrue.

Evidence otherwise appreciated, even if just a compelling theory...

Not giving money to Google if you buy used.

Also, not weird in the context of Google actively maintaining their position as a a top security firm these days, with Project Zero.

Project Zero is their Politburo. It only serves to make people believe that google is not evil.
It serves to make people confident that they're giving up their privacy and at least getting security back in return.

Which is what the general public wants.

For everyone else, there's Graphene.