Why so you care so much about point 6? Feels like overkill.

It’s like going to a vegan community saying “meat isn’t so bad”. You’re obviously not going to get good responses.

If you just use the VPN consider moving to Mullvad! I really loved their service but ended up moving to Proton because I use all their services.

I have premium and I have received emails regarding the family plan, not popups. And honestly I want those emails because the family is a fantastic value proposition. Too bad you only get 3 custom domains to share with 5 other people, that is really not enough :/

If they ever change it to at least a domain per person I want them to email me about it.

That reminds me, I do own a pine64 device! It was the first thing I got on Kickstarter.

It’s a Pine A64, with 2gb RAM. I wonder if it has enough power to run all those things. It’s a budget device from 8 years ago, probably gonna have a hard time but I’ll give it a try if I manage to find it!

Raspberry Pi was my first choice, but apparently I can’t even back order it :/

Even worse than I thought, then :/

My first attempt was to flash the stock LineageOS and then install the microg packages from the fdroid store. I didn’t manage to get that fully working, the microg self-check would have a lot of fails due to version mismatches. I never figured out why. A lot of applications complained about the lack of play services and warned me they wouldn’t work, microg was clearly not installed properly.

Then, I flashed the “LineageOS for MicroG” ROM, which is a LineageOS fork with microg already installed. I had to enable all microg services but the self-check was 100% successful out of the box. No warnings about the lack of play services, everything was mostly working. I installed all software from Fdroid when possible and Aurora Store when not possible.

Push notifications were a bit of a struggle at first but they did work. I still didn’t get notifications to work on Telegram, but “Telegram FOSS” fork seemed to work okay. For GPS/Maps I used Waze (which is technically owned by Google) and it worked flawlessly. I assume you can use other GPS application, I just didn’t do my research on this one. For email I am using Proton Mail, which worked as expected.

The problematic apps were banking/financial apps, which I guess most people can live without. I’m confident the apps would work with microg but simply refused to even start. In Portugal our interbank network developed an application called “MBWAY”, which is really ingrained in the portuguese population. Most people use it. It has a ton of cool functiontionality such as sending money to other people just by using the phone number (instantly and without fees), replacing your ATM/food cards for payments and generating virtual credit cards for online shopping.

I use MBWAY way too much (pun intended), and just decided I didn’t want to live without it. I ended up flashing stock LineageOS and their GAPPS package, which contains the play services and play store app. I still install most stuff from the Aurora and Fdroid store. The banking/financial apps are now working.

I think the apps would work without Google Play services but they refuse to boot without it. Unfortunately since these are banking and finance apps the only alternative is not to use them.

I own a Poco F2 Pro, ROM support is somewhat limited. CalyxOS is insupported, it seems. When this phones starts dying I’ll probably give GrapheneOS a shot!

apt uses debians packages and debian repositories. Unless they recently created an alias or something, it should install debian packaged version!

Yes, that is correct.

I’d love to run a system without Google but it’s hard. I tried to run LineageOS with microg for a week or two but eventually had to install Google Play Services. Lots of hurdles with push notifications and unfortunately some apps really refused to work when they detected no play services installed. It really sadden me, to be honest. Really wanted to make it work.

Never gave Linux phones a chance, I rely too much on apps that wouldn’t be available.

If you use apt-get you aren’t using snaps, you are unaffected.

Snap is a format created by Canonical which has a really funky proprietary back end. The default application store in Ubuntu uses this format and has been plagued with an impersonation problem. Since everyone could submit snaps there was a lot of spyware posing as legit software. My main gripe was when the snap store just decided to unilaterally close and update my Firefox while I was using it.

Linux Mint does NOT have snaps and even had a debian based version. Pretty neat

Power to you, friend. But with current snap store out of the box it’s really hard to recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Linux Mint seems such a better choice to newbies.

At the end of the day it’s not really a big deal, people should just use whatever feels best.

I don’t agree with this. It creates a monetary barrier to starting a new channel. If uploading costs money the number of uploads is going to reduce considerably, no one likes to throw money away.

It’s not shitty, it’s fair. If damage is caused by the overclock why should the manufacturer foot the bill? You modified the product to run outside the specs!

Check your sources, friend.

How do push notifications work on Graphene? I am currently using LineageOS with microg services but the experience has been quite rocky

Not everyone can afford to make this choice, unfortunately.

But the source isn’t WHO, it’s the Chinese government…