very frustrated with how much FUD grapheneos spreads about other solutions
instead of factual explanations of what others are doing, it's just a barrage of "you're wrong" and "this is less secure"

I understand that graphene is very well designed and hardened, they go to great lengths to explain what they are doing themselves, but never actually say exactly what other projects are doing wrong, it's always vague handwavy statements like "they don't implement the same security checks"
I KNOW, but *please* tell me which ones so I can actually make an informed decision based on my personal needs and threat model for fuck's sake

and of course the whole thing with them being so insufferable that no other project is actually willing to work with them
you can complain about harassment all you want but the vitriol obviously goes both ways

i have a lot of respect for what they've built but they're making it really difficult to actually like them

the result of all of this is that I'm setting up a new phone and I can't decide between microg and installing gapps
graphene itself is not an option because root access is a nonnegotiable requirement for me (I regularly need the ability to dig into apps' private data sandboxes), so I'm running lineageos
I need google play compatibility because who doesn't, but because of their antics, no one is willing to integrate graphene's play sandbox into other ROMs, so I can't use the objectively superior option, I just have to accept google's rootkit running unchecked on my device (and it causes a bunch of problems unfortunately) or take a gamble on compatibility

I hate bullshit politics man

@novenary you can root graphene, I got magisk running on graphene for the 15 seconds I had it, but switched to.something else anyway

@ezio yeah I know I can, but I still hate how generally hostile they are so I'm still very hesitant to use it
plus I really like some features lineage has so I'd rather keep them
the compromise for me would be making my own build, but honestly I'm not fond of that idea, I used to build android from source and this isn't something I really find enjoyable anymore

"People can modify GrapheneOS however they want including making their own builds with the officially supported userdebug root support enabled. Open and free doesn't mean catering to power users with the official setup at the expense of everyone else. It doesn't mean sacrificing substantial privacy and security for niche aesthetic customization and other power user features. Defining freedom for devices as software providing more customization options for power users is strange. The freedom is from it being open source and any OS being permitted on the devices."

actually fuck you
being able to access MY data however the fuck I please isn't "niche aesthetic customization", it's being able to use a computer normally
stop being a condescending piece of shit

@novenary microg is honestly fine in practice except that you are just not going to pass google play integrity checks. my bank app doesn’t require it so i can even do nfc payments with it (but i think this is extremely unusal for bank apps)

@novenary I’m using it on and off with regular gapps and yeah

i think the main thing that didn’t immediately work for me was like the raccovid tracking app but that was a brand new api that took some time for microg to implement. and that was also like 5 years ago now

@charlotte my main problem with microg is that compatibility-wise it's not perfect (afaik they're still missing some features) but at least google maps actually seems to work out of the box now while it was completely broken a few years ago

@novenary ah yeah i suppose i don’t use many google apps

it’s probably worth trying out microg at least. do you have a secondary or old phone?

@charlotte my current device (pixel 4a) runs lineage with gapps, I just got the new one (pixel 7a) because of volte compatibility (still needs a workaround but at least it works), I have until january to settle on something and fully switch over, so at least I have time to experiment

I have lineage with microg on it right now, but I might decide to just do my own userdebug build of graphene, it's just completely stupid that you have to jump through those hoops to get something usable instead of them offering the option for flexibility
I'd be much more inclined to buy a second device for development purposes and contribute upstream if that was the case

@novenary I'm still mad graphene yeeted pattern unlock