TLDR: i complain about samsung’s flagship and newer android.
I use samsung flagship phone and it’s crazy, how unable I am to use full potential of my phone, just because I don’t want to log in to google neither to samsung. I try to use F-droid and Aurora Store whenever possible, but its so bad experience…for maps I use Organic Maps, but google forces it to be installed specifically from Google Play Store to work with Android Auto, so I have to log in every time there is an update. Most of games won’t work, because they require being signed-in to google, and thats actually kinda weird…before my phone now I had an old Galaxy S5 Android 6.0 and games there didn’t complain that much as here on Android 14 (so the newer android the less privacy you get, while them all companies “focus on privacy”, bullshit liars), samsung requires signing-in to usd like 1/10 of the flagship features…It’s so sad, as I love samsung’s quality, phone is really outstanding, overall all samsung products are very good quality, but pushing these fucking accounts is convincing me not to buy samsung’s flagship anymore. We need to finally unite and make some alternative to those close-sourced bloatware, as phone industry is nowhere near to being as free as desktop industry. I feel more free using Windoze than those fucking " smart"phones. Really if you have to buy new smartphone and are into privacy, think twice before you buy samsung…phone itself is great, but software side is a nightmare.
I used to use Lineage OS before without gapps and it worked flawlessly although it was few years ago. Give it a try.
If you liked LineageOS without gapps, than I highly recommend DivestOS. It is a soft-fork of LineageOS with significant security hardening and removal of proprietary binary blobs.
lets start the divestos wave, its somehow rarely heard of but has the support of lineageos with the hardening of (almost) grapheneos, and the principles of GNU.
It also has bootloader locking for some devices, which is a plus.
Ive been meaning to flash this onto my fairphone but the websites instructions are a bit confusing (I’ve installed calyx, eos and graphene on other phones)
I would avoid /e/os (and iode) because they are frequently behind on Android security patches. More information here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_history
That’s great if not having to use any proprietary apps depending on google services, including push notifications, since part of divestos unsupported stuff includes:
Which is fine, if you don’t need to use such apps. An alternative to /e/os, which now a days is actually murenaOS, is lineageOS for micro G, which does sort of monthly releases based on whatever is available as nightly releases on lineageOS. It does provide you with microG and also with F-Droid with privileged extensions installed and already set for you. This might be more suitable than divestos if in need for some such apps.
MicroG actually works on DivestOS. It is “unsupported”, as-in the Dev doesnt want to put any significant time into development for Gapps support.
True, but not entirely, signature spoofing needs OS support, and LOS and divestOS don’t, whereas murenaOS (/e/OS) and lineageOS for microG do. Other than that microG’s own f-droid repo makes it easy to keep microG’s component up to date.
That’s why I mentioned it would be nice to upstream divestOS bootloader lock/unlock at will solution, so that not just LOS, but derivative ROMs can inherit that solution. As some people don’t like the tight integration from murena (/e/) with all of its rebranding, LOS for microG is a very appealing option, if wanting full microG’s support. Actually LOS for microG was there quite before /e/ was created.
As I said, DivestOS supports microg. It signature spoofs the latest microg release, enabled with a toggle in the settings.
Ohh, I understand now what you’re saying. LOS (upstream) finally allowed uG to work on their images, though not pre-installed with them, it’s mentioned on LOS4uG FAQ, see question Why do we need a custom build of LineageOS to have microG? Can’t I install microG on the official LineageOS?, the answer includes a couple of references to LOS MRs. I was not aware of that, and that makes all derived ROMs inherit such ability from upstream LOS, including divestOS, so now I see what you were talking about. The answer in that FAQ doesn’t indicate that the official F-Droid client can be installed, and even better neither it or it’s lighter official client (that one never supported privileged extension) require privileged extensions to install apps in the background, so no need to install such extension through adb, and once installed the F-Droid client, one can add the microG repo to keep the uG apps up to date. Therefore no need for LOS4uG actually.
The sad thing is that divestOS images/ROMs are no more, since divestOS is dead. I hope LOS ports divestOS’ boot locking/unlocking mechanism from the still available divestOS repos, that would make LOS even better.
The other sad thing is that as LOS4uG signs with its own keys, different than the LOS ones, once you start with such images, unless you can backup everything, apps, apps settings and contents, LOS settings, and so on, without a google account, you’ll have to keep using it, until you change phone, or you are OK with a factory reset and having to set everything again, since moving to LOS implies different signatures and keys, which in turn implies factory reset and further cleanup to make the image work, :( That holds true if wanting to move to divestOS images as well.
Sorry I didn’t understand what you were saying. I’ve been using LOS before it was named like that (cyanogen), and as far as I can remember when uG showed up, LOS decided it didn’t want to support it, and it was until early last year that it decided to finally allow it, though not helping a bit providing it pre-installed, which is fine, because then the user can get to it, or rather Gapps. So I never read back about LOS criteria changing…