I’m currently not able to use /e/ on my device as it is not supported, so the next best thing was to check which apps /e/ uses by default. I saw that most of them are forks with fixes from other open-source projects, so I was interested in trying those out. However, I don’t see a way to install these forks and keep them up to date excluding compiling it myself. Does /e/ have an F-Droid repo or something similar which allows outsiders to use their apps with ease?
Thanks
No, but many /e/ users use F-Droid repos. The magic of /e/ is that the phone has been degoogled. The /e/ forks are mostly ‘special’ in that they might just have been optimised to work ‘like a suite’. So as a starting point the list of ‘/e/ installed apps’ at least gives you a pointer for the ‘upstreams’ !
I don’t bother with /e/OS default apps - I install the upstream projects from F-Droid and use them instead. As far as I am aware, the upstreams are pretty much ‘Google-free’ already: /e/'s forks seem to mostly involve changing the colour schemes to give them the /e/OS “look and feel”, and integrating them with /e/'s NextCloud instance at ecloud.global. For me, neither of those are worth the downside of lagging consistently behind upstreams in terms of features and bug fixes.
So my ‘default’ apps are Etar (Calendar), QKSMS (Message), K-9 Mail (Mail), Fennec or Firefox (I prefer Mozilla-based browsers to Chromium-based ones, like /e/'s upstream Bromite), DAVx5 and ICSx5 (Account Manager), NextCloud Sync client (eDrive), NextCloud Notes (Notes)
It’s not supported by Lineage. I did see something about Treble roms a while ago. How do they compare to roms made for a specific device, for example the Mi 9 build of ArrowOS I’m currently running. Will the performance be worse, are specific features like the camera notch missing, etc etc