Will LineageOS, Graphene and /e/OS be affected by Google’s changes to prevent sideloading? Is UbuntuTouch or Sailfish OS promising in the long term?
I understand that right now we are in a bad place, but in your opinion, what OS do you think people who care about freedom should rally around?
Although this is the Android community I would support Postmarket OS. They (along with projects like Mobian or Plasma Mobile) are the closest we have to running completely open source mainline Linux on mobile devices.
Ubuntu Touch is doing its own thing. And Sailfish’s UI and infrastructure although nice isn’t open source. In that regard Nemo Mobile is leading the effort of open source Sailfish. Plus you can easily support Sailfish by buying one of their devices or the OS for an Xperia.
But really, the biggest hurdle towards true freedom (appart from locked bootloaders) are device drivers. No idea who you can support in that regard. I think Postmarket is the best contender to have people working on that area, but that’s just a hunch going off of vibes. I doubt any project is employing a full time kernel developer.
I have a Pixel 9 running GrapheneOS, so I’ve been interested in something non-Android. Postmarket seemed like the obvious choice, but it doesn’t officially support any Google phone since the Pixel 3.
I don’t much of anything about these things, but it’s kinda weird that GrapheneOS can leverage Pixel drivers and such, but no non-Android OSs can.
That’s because the Linux kernel in Android is very different from the normal Linux kernel. And device manufacturers often only make drivere available for specific Android kernels that are incompatible with normal Linux.
Hallium (I think it’s called) makes it possible to use an Android kernel and drivers with normal Linux but that probably comes with its own set of problems. One being that you miss out on newer security patches and features of normal Linux.
It’s a mess.