Submitted 4 months ago by squashkin@wolfballs.com to freeforum@wolfballs.com
cross-posted from: https://wolfballs.com/post/8193
I was confused to read this but apparently the goal of LineageOS is not degoogling necessarily and LineageOS is not entirely degoogled.
Apparently it uses Google's DNS servers for example and a few other things
Any further tips on how to do so?
(just search "degoogle" in LineageOS subreddit for example to find posts in question)
what still needs to be fixed on the pinephone in your view? I'm hoping to get a pinephone soon to experiment with
A lot of fundamental stuff just isn't there.
I guess first off, it's fairly unstable. Pretty easy to get basic stuff to not work.
Any given thing doesn't work the way you expect in 2022, and I'd even argue the performance wouldn't have been considered acceptable in 2012 (that year the Galaxy S3 was around). In fact, I've found the performance to be lacking compared to much much older laptops running mobile chips like the Intel Atom.
The battery life is pretty flaky, though that's improved somewhat thanks to improvements in the 5.15 kernel. If you leave an application open, however, you're gonna suck up the battery very quickly. It doesn't put applications that are in memory but not currently active to sleep like android or ios does.
The base pinephone experience is one where you won't have access to most of what would make a linux phone good. Under Plasma Mobile, you need something that's aware that you're on mobile because it needs to present the keyboard if you click on an appropriate input field, so many applications just won't work unless you have the keyboard case. The zoom level is high enough that many desktop applications won't run correctly by default, you just won't be able to see anything. You need something that's programmed with running on a phone in mind. Phosh is better in that it will present you with an icon to bring up a keyboard, but the whole interface is fairly janky and neither of them run very quickly.
Everything seems to rely on wayland, and personally I suspect that might be part of the problem. They get some benefits that are relevant for mobile, but first moved to gnome on wayland and found it barely usable, and then moved to gnome on x11, and found the latter a lot more polished in a lot of ways, and absolutely a lot more stable.
Don't get me wrong -- I love that I have it, I love that it's an option, I love seeing things improve over time, and my hopes are high for the future of the platform, but it isn't really a usable product at this point. If you run a very basic setup and don't intend to do anything other than send and receive phone calls you might be ok, but that's not what people use smart phones for, and I think anyone who ended up trying to run a pinephone as a daily driver would be disappointed and would likely end up going back to their android or apple device at this point.
I should mention there are some other options too, an incomplete android port I've heard isn't really a good choice because it's not really fully set up, a webOS port that is pretty limited because webOS is pretty limited at this point, ubuntu touch is nice looking and felt nice when I ran it on a nexus 5, but it's very much a walled garden and you should not expect to be able to do a lot more than running web apps because ubuntu touch doesn't use wayland or x11, it uses a third option that doesn't support your typical linux applications.
There are a few good android OS's with all the google stuff removed. Typically still some binary blobs in there though. Could still be spying. So can amd and intel chips though. I agree it's best to move towards a android free world and a world where everything is open source. Trust nothing.
https://lbry.tv/@AlphaNerd:8/how-to-de-google-lineageos:6 check out mental outlaw video
If you have any other privacy related questions i have !privacy@wolfballs.com room
thx, yeah I think I saw this vid come up (as a youtube link), but I didn't watch it before
Lineage os is the open source parts of android put together into a functional operating system. It is important in the free android eco system. As you said it still relies on googles dns servers.
It will still be important on linux phones because you can run it in a container to run android apps on linux phones. See Anbox and other like tech
If you want something more degoogle /e/ is a nice step up that removes the need for googles dns servers and also installs some stuff to make it possible to install apps that require some google services. MicroG stuff.
https://e.foundation/e-os/
They start with a build of lineage os (like linux mint starts with ubuntu) and then make their changes to make it more private. It's a pretty good experience. Comes with their own app store. I install fdroid on top of it and try to only use apps from fdroid.
it still relies on googles dns servers
apparently you can set it up to not do so though? but that won't help those who want to use google apps probably
interesting, I heard of /e/ but I didn't necessarily see much support for it, from my short reading I thought it was more of a small project that wasn't taking off
graphene only works on a few phones
Well, DNS servers are just what converts the name you type into the actual addresses. For some people, the Google DNS servers work better than their local DNS servers. The Google ones and the Tier ones are among the faster non-local DNSs. However, the default ISP ones are often better/faster and have the least latency. And in some cases, one might want to use the Jack Henry & Associates DNS server if their local bank uses them. I mean, if it is fast and reliable enough for a bank, then it seems it would be good enough for many.
The main issue here is trust. That is a known way to cancel things, hard-block URLs, redirect traffic, hijack searches, etc. So if your DNS server is biased, crooked, or otherwise malicious, that would be a problem.
So I would like to think that they'd have a way to choose whether you use your local ones or not. If you don't have privacy or information control concerns, then use what is the fastest, but if you do have such concerns, then use servers that you can trust.
/e/ is just lineage os with a few things added on top. Tries to get some revenue by asking you to setup a /e/ account and they offer paid services like storage. All of which I don't do because I don't want them spying on me either. It has pretty decent support. In either case you are doing much better than using the default google phone.
Google is constantly tracking location which they then sell and use as data to train models for maps and other things.
By allowing google to collect your data you are helping fund all the evil things google does. A dns ping here and there isn't a huge deal imo.
As bad as it is to say, Android is Google. You can no more remove Google from Android then you can remove your parents DNA from yourself.
To me, the people who are yearning for freedom should be paying very close attention to the new phones that can run fully powered Linux distributions that you can fully control yourself.
I own a pine phone, and to be clear they're not ready yet, but every month they're getting a little bit closer.