What makes /e/ different?

/e/OS Foundation & Community
21

@Julien: thanks, it seems I was missing this part 2 in my previous reads.

22

You are welcome. Iā€™m happy that I have you useful information. Cheers :blush:

23

After reading that reddit discussion I now have a thirst to know more about how /e/ intend to address the security side. The ultimate goal is to have /e/ shipped by OEMs on their devices, so these security issues need to be addressed at some point.

Is the approach going to be

  1. Get /e/ v1.0 stable
  2. Address all the security issues

Or the other way around?

My use case for /e/ is to replace Google-Android on out-of-support phones used by members of my family, for which I need stability and security.

24

Good: you are at the right place. The V1 is planned to be stable because it wonā€™t be a beta anymore + clear of Google stuff + pipes shouldnā€™t leak to any Google servers so itā€™s a good beginning to have a secure OS.

25

Well, I just worked out that the phone I want to run /e/ v1.0 on will probably not get v1.0 as there is currently no LOS 15.1 build and itā€™s looking unlikely that it will be built.

Still, more information on what the /e/ team are doing to address the security issues raised in that Reddit thread would be appreciated.

26

I found this discussion as Iā€™m interested in verified boot (relocking bootloader after installing the OS). This is one of the points raised by the Copperhead Person on the linked comment on reddit.

I searched for it and it seems that LineageOS will not support verified boot as it would make using gapps harder. My theory (not a developer here) is thatā€™s because any change on the system partition needs to be signed by the same key and they canā€™t distribute gapps for licensing reasons. Following this logic it should not be a problem for /e/ to support verified boot (like CopperheadOS did).

This would be a nice selling point for technical/paranoid users to distinguish /e/ from LOS. Please consider this.

And of course: thanks to everyone for putting your energy into this project. Itā€™s urgently needed.

regards,
hex

2 Likes
27

@hex-m good reasoning. That reddit thread made me think a lot more about things!