CalyxOS is back

Oh, I know. They were fully transparent about the whole thing from the beginning, and vowed to put safeguards in place to prevent this similar thing from ever happening again. I’m not knocking them for this release at all.

It’s still hard for me to transfer my things from one phone to another, and having only one device now makes it that much harder. I’m open to suggestions, though.

The main difference is that GrapheneOS focuses on hardened security (sandboxed Google Play Services, their own browser Vanadium, etc.) and only runs on Pixels, CalyxOS stays closer to stock AOSP, prioritizes privacy with things like microG as a Google services replacement and supports more devices like the Fairphone and some Motorolas

@WitchKnight AFAICT CalyxOS is similar to LineageOS, the defunct DivestOS and so on, basically only modifying ‘surface-level’ things to improve privacy and security by editing the Android OS, but no significant modifications to the kernel.

GrapheneOS can go deeper and create their own, more secure memory allocator, they can integrate things better via the kernel since GOS is only available for Google Pixel devices, which means they can provide the most security on those devices.

CalyxOS is still secure, it’s basically the same as AOSP, which already has a good security model (being the official Android source code and all), and they try to minimize what data gets sent to Google, and trying to spoof what they have to share with them.

GOS goes a step further, they don’t include GMS by default, and they have developed a custom integration which lets you install Google Play Services as user applications (as opposed to system-level), which means GMS cannot access some data, and is basically sandboxed within the user-mode limits. They also forked Chromium (as Vanadium) and also modified it to integrate with the kernel-level improvements such as the hardened memory allocator (malloc).

Of course, people will go out of their way to say that CalyxOS actually weakens the security because they can’t keep up with the frequent security updates to upstream AOSP, which may be true, but they have recently retuened from a hiatus, promising new features and more updates, which remains to be seen if they can keep up.

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There have been debates about what’s what between CalyxOS and GOS for probably years, I don’t really keep up with shitty drama, but at least on a subjective level to me it seems Daniel is quite the asshole to other people that aren’t fully aligned (or neutral) to GOS.

They dried retracting the rights to the browser patches used by Cromite, but that didn’t work because that’s not how code licenses work, for the simple reason that someone from the CalyxOS project created a pull request on GitHub. Created a pull request!

It didn’t even get merged since there wasn’t much to see, but for the sole reason that the PR was made and Cromite’s developer had a few comments, Daniel barged in and caused a scene. The GOS account regularly gets into arguments with people on Fedi, they block anyone that’s even slightly opposed or critical of them.

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Sure, the code is great and I probably would use GOS if I could afford a Pixel device, but it comes with the stink carried by Daniel’s drama. If there was a comparable project to GOS, I’d use that instead.

There’s also this “objective” comparison page: https://eylenburg.github.io/android/_comparison.htm, but do note that Daniel lurks and comments on the github PRs and issues of this site.

Can be installed on more than just Pixels. Uses microG instead of sandboxing.