Hello,
I just wanted to share my thoughts and worries to the /e/-community, since maybe they are shared by some other (passive) readers as well. Personally, I am very much concerned about my data, but unfortunately, I would consider myself a layman when it comes to technical issues. Years ago in old student days, I played around with Ubuntu and the raspberry pie, but right now, I stick to Windows and ‘normal’ Android – because usually they just ‘work’; for personal reasons, I neither have time making things work nor do I find joy in it. When I think back, trying to get Ubuntu work, I remember some situations that brought me to the limits of my (limited) technical understanding, which I try to avoid now, since I feel somehow dependent on a working phone and time is getting more and more scarce.
I am thinking about buying a pre-configured /e/ (Fair-)Phone because it seems to be the most sustainable phone available in the market (I hope that I can use it for several years). I learned that the /e/ foundation made a great job in making in easy to migrate to /e/ (some compatibility with the google universe is important for work-related reasons), I am also ready to invest time in this process. However, I am somehow worried that due to external reasons, things will stop working from one day to another (which I did experience in Ubuntu and raspberry pie, mostly due to software changes) – worst case a discontinuation of the /e/-project, necessitating a big moving process.
To keep things short: Having experience with the /e/-OS, do you think you think it suits a layman with very little time resources?
Best
Haskala
Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online services
Define “some compatibility”.
/e/ can not guarantee Google-dependent stuff to work at all times.
My personal opinion at this very moment: No.
The planned V1.0 state hasn’t been reached yet, and the developers just now are working their way back from pretty severe updating failures on the Fairphone 3 (boot failures, suggesting to users to factory reset and lose their data, which some users did before workarounds were known), which were not for the faint of heart … or for those with very little time resources.
I’m not quite sure if I would consider /e/ ready for non-technical people yet. I do however believe that if you are going to try /e/OS, the Fairphone is the best device to try it on as Fairphone themselves offer instructions on installing Fairphone OS and downloads so you won’t have to hunt down random images in the hope it’s the stock ROM.
Hi @Haskala,
I made the jump in August 2019 and then decided
I’d rather use a cheap, used iPhone in June 2020.
And I’m not even sure I’m leaking more information,
as long as I do not install Whatsapp and Facebook and I do not connect my iPhone to my Gmail account.
In other words, I ask: is it worth all the trouble?
Or is refraining from doing dumb things enough?
Don’t use Whatsapp and Facebook, don’t use Google Search, and, even more important, don’t ever connect your iPhone to your Gmail account.
This depends on what you want to do with it.
If you want to use it for messaging (mail, messenger, sms, mms), calendar, task management, taking notes, taking some pictures, doing some navigation tasks and listening to music … the daily things, it will probably do a good and reliable job. And you do have alternatives for every app if one very special will not work.
I would not expect that it’s currently a good platform for gaming, taking high quality video sequences or connecting with 3rd party hardware over bluetooth (like glucose measurement devices, insuline pumps, card readers, sport watches, controlling or surveilling cars or houses …) because such things need mostly a proprietary software on the phone.
I also would not expect that everything always works what you have been using for years on other devices. It’s better to expect that things change from update to update, also in the UI.
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