Graphene vs /e/ os

4 months ago by MostRegularPeople to c/privacy

A question as old as time, I know.

I'm getting away from Google and I've done the easy stuff: CoMaps, Proton mail (I know, not the best move), aveslibre, etc. I currently don't have the time (or the knowledge base) to learn how to self host, but hopefully that will replace Drive and such in the future.

But I digress. I'm looking at a new OS for my phone. I'm currently in a contract with a phone that is incompatible with alternative OSs. Graphene needs a Pixel. Used, they're $150-400. /e/OS will run on a Motorola or whatever and those are like $80.

There's also the option of going full Fairphone with /e/os and I like that idea in the future.

The internet people tell me that Graphene is the best due to ease of installation, privacy, and security.

I don't need a lot of security. I just want Google to stop suckling all that sweet, sweet data from my teat.

What are your thoughts?

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nkk 58 points 4 months ago

Graphene is the best by a long shot, security wise and degoogling wise. In fact, you can use GrapheneOS with absolutely zero Google services running on your phone. /e/OS uses MicroG which while better than your usual Android phone, still runs with privileged access to your device. This is in contrast to GrapheneOS' optional sandboxed Google services implementation which gives Google the same privileges any other app on your phone would have.

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MostRegularPeople 18 points 4 months ago

Thank you for detailing in one paragraph what I was unable to understand after reading articles about it all last evening.

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skarn 16 points 4 months ago

It is also largely questionable.

/e/OS has MicroG, and that runs as a system service. You can disable most of it, and if you're not using any App that needs Google services, I doubt it really does much.

It is possible to use Graphene without using any Google at all. However... Doing so will break almost every app out there. Anything that needs push notifications, AndroidAuto, a thousands more things. So you end up using Graphene with Sandboxed Google services.

And we get into the debate. Is it better to take the official Google Play Services, which we all consider malicious, and run it in a sandbox, or take an open source private, and trusted implementation (MicroG) and run it as a system service?

It is at the very least largely debatable.

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