Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promoter. Pronouns: any
Also /u/CaptainBeyondDS8 on reddit and CaptainBeyond on libera.chat.
AI Disclosure: No “generative AI tools” are used to produce any work attributed to “Captain Beyond of Sunhillow” (here or elsewhere).
/e/OS is just LineageOS with a bunch of cloud crap and a proprietary map app.
Their voice to text feature uses a cloud server that uses OpenAI on the backend. This is something that could and should run locally, but the local ones are apparently not good enough and instead of investing into developing them they are going to use a cloudy thing.
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using-open-ai/70509
Just use LineageOS
People should start doing so. This “android isn’t real linux” nonsense is actively harmful misinformation at this point
Free software is about freedom, not price. It is perfectly ok to sell free software. Even if Voyager cost money to download as long as it gives users the four freedoms it is free software.
As far as I know there are several non-free Lemmy apps as well as a handful of paid apps.
Been a while since I used microG but I remember the Google registration specifically being opt-in. Then again, I also remember reading that /e/OS automatically enables it, so…
I do not have a high opinion of /e/OS or Murena. It is LineageOS but “degoogled” which is a meaningless buzzword considering LineageOS already does not contain Google services/apps (you have to install those yourself). Instead it’s connected to its own “Murena cloud” which itself uses OpenAI for a speech to text service. But hey, it’s not google so it must be okay, right…?
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using-open-ai/70509
It might be opt in (or opt out? dunno) but this sort of thing should not be a cloud thing, it should be a local service.
It also comes with at least one proprietary app built into the OS and their app store offers proprietary apps with some sort of “tracker detection” thing. I do not trust any “app store” that purports to tell me which proprietary apps are “good.”
LineageOS comes with no google apps, no cloud apps, no proprietary apps, etc. It’s just a perfectly usable AOSP system. It doesn’t even have an “app store” but you can install F-Droid on it. I think GrapheneOS is the same (it supports “sandboxed Google services” but it doesn’t include them by default)
As far as I know the only options that exist are LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and maybe non-Android Linuxes if you’re brave enough. There used to be DivestOS which although based on LineageOS brought several security, privacy, and freedom improvements, but that project has been discontinued. None of these “degoogled privacy OS” LineageOS reskins impress me.
It does seem like a bug. I actually have a UnifiedPush distributor but have never configured Fennec to use it (I didn’t even know it was an option) but now Fennec shows me this warning and there is no way to actually enable it in settings anymore.
It should be noted this is not any sort of actual anti-malware tool. By “lists the trackers” it just means it looks for strings in the compiled bytecode. This is prone to false positives (if the “tracker” classes are stubbed out, e.g. in Fennec F-Droid) and doesn’t actually tell you if or how these libraries are actually used.