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Fleeing Google's Apps and iOS, Mandrake Linux Creator Launches 'eelo' Project (hackernoon.com)
Open-source veteran Gaël Duval created Mandrake Linux in 1998. But in a new essay, he writes that "I realized that I had become lazy. Not only wasn't I using Linux anymore as my main operating system, but I was using a proprietary OS on my smartphone. And I was using Google more and more."
Long-time Slashdot reader nuand999 writes: He's creating a non-profit project called eelo.io that's going to release a "privacy-friendly" smartphone OS and associated web-services... eelo is going to be forked fromLineageOS, and will ship with the existing open source bricks put together into a consistent and privacy-enhanced, yet desirable, smartphone OS + web-services. A crowdfunding campaign has just started on Kickstarter to fuel early developments.
"iOS is proprietary and I prefer Open Source Software," Gaël writes on Hacker Noon, while also adding that "like millions of others, I'VE BECOME A PRODUCT OF GOOGLE... I'm not happy because Google has become too big and is tracking us by catching a lot of information about what we do. They want to know us as much as possible to sell advertising..."
"People are free to do what they want. They can choose to be volunteery slaves. But I do not want this situation for me anymore. I want to reconquer my privacy. My data is MY data. And I want to use Open Source software as much as possible."
Long-time Slashdot reader nuand999 writes: He's creating a non-profit project called eelo.io that's going to release a "privacy-friendly" smartphone OS and associated web-services... eelo is going to be forked fromLineageOS, and will ship with the existing open source bricks put together into a consistent and privacy-enhanced, yet desirable, smartphone OS + web-services. A crowdfunding campaign has just started on Kickstarter to fuel early developments.
"iOS is proprietary and I prefer Open Source Software," Gaël writes on Hacker Noon, while also adding that "like millions of others, I'VE BECOME A PRODUCT OF GOOGLE... I'm not happy because Google has become too big and is tracking us by catching a lot of information about what we do. They want to know us as much as possible to sell advertising..."
"People are free to do what they want. They can choose to be volunteery slaves. But I do not want this situation for me anymore. I want to reconquer my privacy. My data is MY data. And I want to use Open Source software as much as possible."
and itâ(TM)s open source
this will end well for all involved, especially the backers
eelo is going to be forked from LineageOS
...and thats where I stopped reading. Lineage is a stable, excellent fork of cyanogen that already supports everything Duval wants. fdroid provides floss apps and adblocking, and even access to Edward Snowdens Guardian repositories for things like secure browsers and newsreaders. As far as web services go, you choose to use them. there are decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter already supported on smartphones tablets and PC. It sounds like this guy is too lazy to look for alternatives.
https://mastodon.social/about for open source twitter
https://joindiaspora.com/ for open source facebook
https://prism-break.org/en/ for secure floss alternatives
https://duckduckgo.com/ for a search that doesnt track
Good people go to bed earlier.
I do very much believe there is an untapped, privacy-focused market segment for this kind of thing. It has some overlap, but is not identical to, the target market for the Essential phone. I'm currently in the sub-$100 market when it comes to smart phones, but I would gladly pay many times that amount to have a phone free from Android/Google. It doesn't need to be modular, it doesn't need a huge-ass screen or an octo-core processor, facial recognition, or fingerprint reading... better, in fact, that it DOESN'T have those things. I don't need them, they compromise privacy, and increase the cost.
It DOES need to work, out of the box. No weird reflashing routines, no kernel/driver issues, none of that janky CyanogenMod stuff. It does need to be compatible with Android apps, for most people. (For me, I'd be OK with using an open-source Telegram client, if the official Android one doesn't work for some reason. What few other apps I use can either be replaced or accessed through a browser.)
Google really is one of the big reasons I'm hesitant to use my smartphone for anything non-trivial. They (and Apple) are two of the reasons I didn't even own one until a couple years ago. I couldn't bear to spend $500+ for that. I'm just sitting here waiting for someone to monetize me.
Is something that just WORKS, and they don't have to think about it or pay a lot for it.
That's why Android is so popular, even tied to Google. You buy the phone, and it works. It's a little less 'walled garden' than iOS, which is nice.
Would it be nicer to go to the store and get a completely unfettered phone? Yes. But I'd expect that to come with a lot of end-user requirements that are impractical for the vast majority of people who have trouble with a power button.
Android has long been crap on tablets. Target tablets business use.
1) Fix the lifespan of activities, make a clear 'exit' on them, so the OS knows when they should be removed and when not. Stop unloading apps if the user hasn't exited them.
2) Fix the GUI so that multiple apps run in multiple panes automatically, not twiddling with window size, then launching app into new window.... they should just run the app and it should sort itself out.
3) Fix the compiler and other limits (heap size, limits on the size of compiled methods etc.).... Google are so use to making little 'todo' list apps the compiler and OS are stuffed full of stupid little limits. Business apps need the full memory usage, and need to cope with big complex code.
4) Fix the privacy settings. Apps are told when they're denied access to a service, and they can demand access one by one or suddenly decide they won't run. So they can incrementally increase the demands at the time you're most in need of their service. Fuck em, apps should be told fake locations and denied network access at a whim of a user. No more "give me network access", (later) "give me access to your phone book" (later) give me access to your messages.... each time sending the data off in bulk to their servers. Ever seen the amount of data Microsoft sends to itself from those Office apps you never agree to that come pre-installed? I see it accesses your contacts, I see it sends a big packet across, it's not difficult to see what they're doing there.
5) Google's stuff is spyware. Even their 'improve location' services sniffs WifiSSIDs and logs them. There should be a clean OS there, no 'third party' apps.
6) Google maps is a joke, ever seen their "pale white streets on a pale yellow background" color scheme? Does a business tablet need maps to run the corporate app? Why do you need it.
7) Turn the fooking cameras off. It's a tablet for business, not a phone for selfies!
8) Google assisent, Amazon Alexa, Bixby.... no, turn the fooking mic's off too.
9) ChromeOS/Android mashup is a big flop, if you need a large Android tablet for business, you buy it, realize it treats Android as little applets and is basically trying to shove Chrome on you, pointless piece of crap. THERE IS A BIG OPPORTUNITY HERE. Likewise Google's latest attempt to make Android smaller for phones with less than 1GB of ram is moronic, the difference between 1GB and 2GB ram is the picture used to etch the chip. CLUELESS.
What Android needs is to be stripped free from the Google crap, some (relatively minor) fixes to the gui, and it is a decent tight OS for running business apps. The basic OS is excellent, good solid multi-threading, clean, stable,.... it lacks local network services, it adds a lot of 'power saving' features which simply kill apps at the whim of the OS, it adds a lot of privacy invading features that mean they can't be used for business. All of these can be fixed.
The biggest way a cellphone invades my privacy is tracking everywhere I go. There is no way to fix that with software unfortunately.
Also can you fix Android's crappy scroll bars?
You drag a pane up, and the page changes p2,p3,p4,p5....
If your finger is at the right edge, the same 'drag up' action will do something like page20, page19, page 18... in the other direction.
These invisible scroll bars that appear when you operate them are unworkable for large documents. When you first place your finger you don't know where on the invisible bar your finger should be, so the page jumps, so first off it jumps to page 20, or 50 or whatever.
Then there's the direction problem, a drag on the main pane goes one way, a drag on the scroll bar goes the other way. You don't know if you're over the bar because its invisible.
These are shit, in practice you use the main pane drag and avoid the scroll bars, and then its only suitable for short lists. Fine for 'todolist' and fart apps, but useless for bulk document editing.
Try porting LibreOffice to Android and you quickly see its shortcomings. All of these are trivial to fix, the roadblock is Google here.
Every time I read about the topic of tracking, companies like Google, facebook, etc. are positioned as the adversary. Everyone is so obsessed with being tracked for advertising purposes. Have we forgotten about the NSA? Snowden? Warrant-less wiretaps? FISA courts? We're all being tracked by forces much darker than that silly Alphabet company. All Google is trying to do is make sure dudes don't see tampon ads. Meanwhile, secret courts can approve tracking your every move, but nobody seems to care. They just better not see an ad that's been customized for them!
Seriously, it's that freaking simple. Just use a different browser when surfing for porn. All you have to do is never sign in with your main user id in the alt browser, just make up an alt id for your porn sites. It's that freaking simple.
Eelo? Sounds like Ello... Which has almost the same goals in mind...
I couldn't possibly give a fuck about streaming music. However, I do want GPS navigation; OsmAnd does that for me, all offline.
This story is a representative example of why open source remains small and obscure. Everyone wants to be a boss and we have tens of thousands of crappy little projects instead of a few great ones.
People need to stop saying this. This makes a claim that is beyond the speaker's knowledge and likely to be untrue as well as misrepresentative. Not only do we not know why the organizations that collect information about us do this, the organizations don't know all the reasons for which they'll use that data. Some data collection might initially be ad-related but the information collected has multiple purposes like everything else in life, but collected information might be just as valuable to target people for murder via drone, inquire about application preferences, or a variety of other uses serious and trivial. You think you're submitting a DNA sample for familial relation analysis but you've also handed over data showing a genetic predisposition for some disease which will become the reason why you'll be denied something you want. Your location data reveals your haunts and if you carry a tracker (aka cell phone or mobile) with you in your house, reveals something about what you do when you think you're alone in the privacy of your home.
Talking about selling advertising makes the data collection seem more innocent than it might be, doesn't recognize the multiple purposes of the collected information, and says nothing about the constant spying going on in people's daily lives (particularly where Google, publishers of the Android OS, are concerned). We should casually reinforce the need for privacy in our lives and the lives of others, not ignorantly reduce the perceived harm in constant data collection.
Digital Citizen
Will that new OS come with spellcheck?
Most people's top fear should be spying by cybercriminals. And although government spying has no practical effect on MOST people, it goes very badly for those it does affect. In comparison, what will smartphone vendors do to you with information they collect? Show you more useful ads? Fix bugs you are running into? Having said that, weirdos are useful. His unusual concerns are giving me an additional operating system that might one day be useful for something. Just like RMS couldn't bear to print things with a closed source driver and created an ecosystem.
I love the idea -- but I must say that using Mandriva Linux on my laptop (c. 2009) for a year turned me from being a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fanboy to a Windows/MacOS user.
The final straw was trying to build the Arduino IDE from scratch (as there was no package available at the time) took me about 3 days -- including a compiler downgrade, etc. Of course, due to unstable hardware support, I spent 15 minutes each work session trying to connect to whatever network was available.
After all that work, I was able to run this IDE in about 5 minutes by launching the Windows Virtual Machine.
So nowadays I tell people to only go with extremely mainstream Linuxes if they choose to use this OS on their primary machines. I still love Linux on servers, embedded machines, etc.
So I _hope_ this project succeeds -- but they better get some basic stuff right (hardware, ONE working interface to accomplish a given task -- as opposed to 3 kind-of-working interfaces, etc.).
Bloat. They shouldn't bundle stuff like AudioFX, the email client and Browser as system apps; it just adds megabytes to the ROM download and adds useless icons to the launcher. Why not provide a LineageOS repo or upload them to f-droid?
You nailed it here. It needs to be a smartphone / OS that just (mostly) works for people who aren't going to have any idea what "rooting their phones" is and cares about user privacy. Relying on Apple to be our only vendor who cares about privacy is not a good long term strategy (one CEO change away from seeing the enhanced profits of mining users personal data for $). This seems a long shot but when there isn't another shot around a long shot is better than nothing.