ELI5: Why use /e/OS over Graphene? This isn’t a rhetorical rant; I’m genuinely curious.
Edit: See below. I misphrased this question.
You don’t own a pixel?
Sorry, I realize that question could be interpreted in two ways: I meant for Fairphone not to try to get Graphene working on their phone. I know Motorola is trying to do that right now, for example.
From what I’ve read elsewhere (seen some comments here, don’t remember the exact threads) the Graphene team has a specific hardware requirement that Fairphone doesn’t supply. Would be cool to see both projects working together though
Well in that case, it’s cool to see Fairphone using /e/OS!
That hardware requirement is something they could work on for upcoming phones.
That would be awesome if they do so. I like /e/OS for what it is and does, my FP4 works great after all. That said, having the option for Graphene OS I feel would do nothing but benefit all parties, so hopefully that can be addressed at some point.
The team behind GrapheneOS want it to be really secure so they have specific requirements that the phones from Fairphone sadly doesn’t meet.
For a phone to meet all of these requirements AND still being everything that a Fairphone is would make the phone more expensive than the average consumer would be willing to pay. I know several enthusiasts (me included) that would pay for one, but there are simply just to few of us.
It’s mostly a thing of what’s available for your phone. For pixels 6 and newer (and I think some new motorolas as of recently) you can use graphene. If you are on fairphone or a bunch of other devices, you have support for e/OS. In general, graphene is a bit more secure than e/OS, so if you have the choice, it’s probably the way to go but if you don’t have a pixel and don’t want to buy one, e/OS is probably one of the better maintained degoogled android versions out there.
Here you can find a list with a feature comparison.
I’ve been using /e/OS on a FP6 for a few months now and I’m very happy with it (edit: for context I’m in Europe). I had doubts about whether it could run certain apps like bank or government apps but they work just fine. Most of the default apps work well, but I did replace the launcher because the one that comes with /e/OS doesn’t have as many features as I would like.
Battery life is also better than previous phones I’ve used. I don’t know if that’s because of the hardware or because the OS is less resource hungry.
One thing to watch out for is it doesn’t have a headphone jack, though you can get a separate adapter that plugs into the charging port.
