cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34045100
still deciding to fully degoogle with GOS or muddling through with what I have (proprietary, data grabbing and bloated).
To understand the question, compare with my main hardware with debian on it: a regular notebook I bought in 2016 and I’ve used heavily for all kinds of stuff: working, writing papers, downloading and playing media including AV1, editing audio, torrenting…
One of the best investments I ever made, considering what I paid and how prices nowadays are. Debian offers regular upgrades and I don’t have to check if my hardware is going to support the software on a level comparable with android devices (GOS only runs on pixels, other open-source, privacy focused Android operating systems have similar hardware restrictions).
I want this kind of ROI for the device I buy and the software I use, but I don’t know if that’s possible:
GOS drops support for older pixels but I don’t know how many years any particular device is supported by GOS: 3 years? not enough. There’s no way I’m buying a new pixel every 3 years. I’d even consider 6 years restrictive.
By 8 years old even the newest devices will be out of software support and using EOL phones is not a particularly great idea for security. GOS’s security focus goes out of window if you use an old version with known vulnerabilities.
Sailfish OS has very long support times and the licenses I got so far are without time limit. IIRC that has changed or might change but still significantly longer than any vendor Android.
Question is how “real” that support is - firmware updates matter and depend mostly on the chip manufacturer’s support.
Can you give examples for this?
The deeper problem is that the OS Vendors for phones are already adversial. They want to extract as much pesonal data as possible. IMO, that is not really better than having malware on one’s phone.