Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
Sort of. They use SeedVault, but a bunch of apps are not backed up. When restoring another set of apps do not properly restore
So you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, you are under even more surveillance and experience more advertising.
Pretty mediocre -- not totally useless, but far from a seamless experience.
Convenience-wise, this is true both for the small daily stuff and large occasional stuff.
Day-to-day:
- For work I have to deal with .docx, .xlsx, .pots, and .pdf on a regular basis, both reading and authoring. Libreoffice mucks up formatting in both directions for Word documents. Web Office365 sucks in comparison to desktop O365. Linux PDF viewers are fine until you have to fill out a form and digitally sign one.
- Mechanical CAD: my team uses Fusion 360. There’s Windows and Mac versions. I haven’t tried it under Wine. I suspect it’d be painful. I’ve tried some OSS solutions. Not pleasant.
- ECAD: KiCAD has grown up and has become my primary ECAD tool. Hooray!
- Time Machine: for my Linux machines I have a great setup that pushes backups to Backblaze B2 using restic. For my current laptop, I plug an external drive in every morning and Time Machine does its magic. I also run the B2 script for off-site occasionally.
- Phone calls: OS X and iOS have fantastic hand-off. I do most of my work communication through Teams and Slack, both of which work fine on Linux. Phone calls, though... if my phone starts ringing, I get a notification on my laptop and can just click "Answer" to take the phone call through the headphones I'm already wearing.
- Clipboard integration: I actually started writing this comment on my phone and then decided to move over to my laptop. Copying it on my phone automatically put it in my clipboard to paste on my laptop.
Hardware compatibility:
- My last Linux desktop was fabulous. Happily drove a 4K display, I loved living in XFCE every day. There was one issue that was extraordinarily frustrating: if the machine sat unused for somewhere around 24-72 hours it would enter a very strange power state. The machine was still powered up to some degree, but was completely unresponsive. I could use it every day with no issue, for weeks. If I didn't use it for that 24-72h timeframe, boom, it would get into this state. This only ever happened to me while I was travelling. I did several deep debug dives into this to no avail, including at one point setting up the kernel logger to log over serial to another embedded machine. I pointed a security camera at it to see if, say, a cat or some other obvious physical thing was causing it. I ended up hooking up an Ethernet-controlled power bar so that I could power cycle it and access the data that was on it. Tried multiple kernels, many different kernel command-line options, never did get to the bottom of it.
- My older 2014 Mac Mini that sat next to it was bulletproof. I could do 98% of what I was doing with the Linux desktop machine remotely on that machine just fine. Mostly there were some embedded Linux tasks that wouldn't work well on the Mac.
OS Updates:
- My current phone (iPhone 12 Pro) is 6 years old. It's running the latest OS. You can have an experience like this with stock Android distributions if you very carefully research which vendors and specific devices use... I forget what it's called... Google One? My dev phone is a Nokia and it got updates for a long time. I don't remember when/if they stopped.
- The idea of having to custom compile or hunt down OS updates from a third party destroys the convenience of this for me. I want to spend essentially 0% of my life thinking about what to do for an OS for my phone or tablet.
- My old 10-year-old Macbook Pro finally stopped receiving updates a year or two ago. It runs Linux now quite happily. It's a fantastic Linux machine.
Occasional new device setup:
- Back to the article, the Apple "I have a new phone/iPad/laptop" story is just unbeatable. I couldn't even tell you what the steps involve because they involve virtually no thinking at all. It's roughly "hold your new device near your old device". You maybe have to log into it first. It requires no thought at all.
This has always been my core Linux desktop woe--there's always, no matter what CPU GPU (including (and most often), no dGPU at all) combo/distro I've used, been sleep wake issues of some variety.
I've had AMD CPUs with both fedora and Ubuntu that would never sleep if they weren't woken to desktop (i.e if not logged in, then allowed to automatically turn off the display) they'd never sleep. On those and any of the machines since, I never get more than a month of uptime without it being unresponsive when trying to wake it or similar, regardless of if Kernel updates have been installed etc.
Play Integrity and Google's monopoly on providing "hardware attestation".
Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested in locking customers into their own ecosystem. On the Android front, that isn't all that different from getting a Pixel. Of course, getting an Android based Samsung adds an extra company who wants to do the same as well as selling space to third parties.
While Android being more open does add complexity, it is mostly limited to those who buy devices produced by another vendor or those who choose to exercise their freedom (e.g. by choosing to install a third-party version of Android, or installing a third-party "app store", or developing their own software).
Paradox is, that with Pixel device you can get most freedom and security togather. Installation of GrapheneOS is easiest custom ROM installation that could possibly be.
If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit?
If I have to turn Graphene into a Pixel to make it usable, and I did, there’s not much point. And the apps are 90% of the time very noticeably better on iOS, so overall turns into a very bad trade.
I disabled Google Photos but I didn't notice any issues with Camera except for not being able to open the photo just taken from the camera interface. Am I missing something else?
I avoid RCS like a plague, so I can't comment about that.
I am not sure why would you have to install messages has nobody uses RCS these days.
As for calendars and contacts, I am struggling to see the added value over the fossify alternatives, hence I don't have them anymore on my smartphones.
Pixel camera and google photos are nice to get the most out of tye pixel camera but thanksfully grapheneOS lets you use them without access to network. Stock Pixel rom doesn't allow you to do that. That is a major difference imho.
I think it's because they got blamed for not warning everyone with the Valencia floods last year but it's really ridiculous now. Now they blow up everyone's phone just when there's going to be a bit of wind.
and you get absolutely nothing in return. Yeah you will have root access sometimes. But other than that, android is not opensource anymore.
I mean, it never was because you had hundreds (no exaggeration [1]) closed-binary blobs running (not to mention a whole OS on things like radio and camera, running on their own SoC), but now you cannot get even close to a proper of the userspace since google already anounced they will not be mainlining anything back to AOSP
[1] zero source for kernel pieces, even for pixel https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_laguna-kernels_6...
You get improved privacy and security, at least on some fronts. By default, GrapheneOS does not provide root access and recommends against rooting the device. Is there a trade-off? Certainly. Security and privacy are always at conflict with what a completely open platform can provide. Given the amount of access to personal information that goes through our devices and the number of bad actors out there (both behaving legally and illicitly), some people believe it is worth the price. At least GrapheneOS offers more transparency than Android or iOS.
The bit about clamping down on open source, that is very much disappointing. I doubt that it is going to go away entirely in Android. On the other hand, hopefully it will provide incentives for companies to explore developing more open alternatives and consumers to explore buying more open alternatives. It won't be a huge market, but many of us have avoided growing so dependent upon the current platforms that we couldn't simply walk away.
It was probably for saying everyone else doesn't deserve the piece of the pie. That's incredibly subjective on my part.
More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".
If you are comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. setting up pre-installed Linux verses pre-installed Windows, or installing Linux to installing Windows), I would argue that Linux has been in the lead for many years. Setting up a reasonable desktop distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) is no more and no less technical. Linux distributions won't encourage you to create online accounts, try to upsell you online services, or bombard you with questions about privacy settings.
From my last experience with macOS: on a technical front, macOS is simpler to reinstall. The online account setup and upselling is far less intrusive (perhaps to the point where you can legitimately consider it as a beneficial setup step for the end user). Perhaps macOS has the lead, but it is a marginal one.
The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.
I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.
If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.
Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible.
When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.
Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.
I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
I set up a new one for my son on Christmas Eve and I almost gave up completely.
iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone.
Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone.
All the companies want to hold your data hostage.
storing things in the cloud is responsible
I don't even use a Google account on my phone. Most apps don't need it! There's only a handful that do, in particular ChatGPT that really insists you have a Google account logged in (why they force you to make an account with their direct competitor is beyond me but they do)
But perplexity is much better anyway so I use that.
Local copies should always be primary and cloud copies secondary.
But you don't get to extract rent in that case which is why none of the big companies want to do things that way.
(It reminds me of the major car manufacturers ignoring what Tesla saw as vital - having a reliable trustworthy easy to use charging network was as important as the BEV itself.)
I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business.
The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.