I kinda don’t get why LineageOS distributions are not more of a thing. I don’t think LineageOS should weigh itself down with a bunch of apps, but I do think a distribution which fleshes some things our with some sane defaults would be usefull.
In some ways \e\ is doing this, but layering on cloud services.
I’m imaginging something with say vanilla F-Droid + Priveleges , K9 Mail , Etar , Conversations and Silence all preinstalled for example and a custom startup wizard to help you set a couple of them up with whatever service you might have.
I watched /e/'s crowdfunding video because I wanted to know how to pronounce it. I was hoping it was “slash-e-slash” or “slashy slash,” but no, it’s simply “e”. lol. they didn’t say “e” until halfway through the video.
the video is a lot! their metaphor is that personal data is our new petroleum and they want to free us from servitude by being digital plumbers. this is an amazing graphic:
despite being such a huge fan crowdfunding, and working at indiegogo extremely visibly for over three years, i don’t like watching crowdfunding pitch videos. in general i much prefer reading to listening/watching for finding out something i want to know. it must be something about how my brain processes information, plus impatience. i can glance over text until i find what’s relevant to me, but that’s harder with audio or video unless their video player has good scrobbling and their video makes a lot of sense. haha.
/e/'s name is … has been a reocurring issue for them. It was originally marketted as eelo but they ran afoul a trademark. They switched to /e/ which I think had a certain appeal in terms of simplicity. (Theyre giving out @e.email addresses for example.) However is terrible in practice. (Heck I had to escape those slashes in discourse).
Their doing a lot of things right, but their also in some terms a hot mess still and potentially doing more than a few things wrong. But their also in a high state of flux, still. They do have potential and I wanna see what they look like when they stabilize. I tried them out back in October for a few days. Might try it out again here soon.
I thought they were; it seems like a lot of people use LOS bases to build their own ROMs. I thought the reason none of them were good and popular was because LOS makes it easy to spin up a personal image, and that’s where we landed.
Think think think.
I’m feeling… curmudgeonly. Folks should get a dialer and a web browser and that’s it!
A lot of them are layering on different core OS feature engines changes or customized kernel tweaks. But I guess my beef is that few are providing actual competitors to google’s userland application suite.
Some of it I wouldn’t expect. But like I feel like there is a big push in the community to steer people to Conversations or Matrix instead of Hangouts / K9 Mail or ProtonMail’s app instead of Gmail.
And it would be kinda nice for end users if the narrative was install this one thing; and not install this one thing. Then sideload f-droid, then hunt and peck through its catalog for the half dozen apps were recommending.
EDIT:
But I guess my beef is that few are providing actual competitors to google’s userland application suite.
To elaborate the implied user experience with a lot of these roms is that you will be layering on google apps a few breaths later.
I don’t use apps because using anything beyond what’s on offer in FDroid means opting in to be tracked by one or more of a handful of companies.
That means I can’t configure Helm, or use Signal, or call a car through an app, or post to megacorp social media… because I don’t want Google or Apple to know who I am.
This is all a leadup: how can we recommend a mobile device to anyone?
Well, maybe we say look, all these apps are cool and use these free and open protocols and a private user is you!
But no one is gonna call a car or order groceries or use the map voice assistant their used to. Because those require gapps or Apple.
If the web was ruined by commercial interests, mobile computing was sabotaged from the beginning.
But this is #ideation! Keep it positive, @maiki, no one seemed to mention.
How about a pivot-take! How about we double-down on the few apps we have, which only seem small in relation to the literal millions of crap programs are produced by either people stealing money from users, or the hackers making malicious software (heeyo!). We make tight UI improvements, and market our new zen essential mobile computing OS: the computer partner that travels with you in your pocket like a sleek pokeball, and like a pokeball you only bust it out when you are suddenly challenged, such as by needing to know the time, or snapping a pic of a flyer, or calling for help as a wild pokemon attacks nearby villagers.
That’s only 87% kidding. EssentialOS is where it’s at!
I’ll skip trying to make sense of what I said, I suspect missing words or something.
Anyhow: people don’t want FDroid. You can’t do anything with FDroid as well as people using the Gapps are, and that’s the thing we’re fighting, ne? All those networked services posing as apps?
Hmmm, if FDroid is already installed, but the next thing people do is install gapps, what am I missing? A more friendly list of apps installed? I find Lineage to be fairly complete out of the box. I only use three additional apps (Conversations, Fennec, and Red Moon [screen dimmer]). What is there to improve?
All sincere questions. Let’s build this up so I understand.
