I fully used Google Services for my Android phone for the past 3 months. That is quite a long time for me for quite a while. Since I’ve been encountering some stuttering and frequent slow downs, I decided to finally wipe the memory and flash another ROM, not fully ungoogled but still with microg.
With my use case for that duration, I really do not need Google services. Time to dig deep again to current Android development, I hope I can keep up.
On the desktop side, openSUSE Tumbleweed still gives me excitement everyday of using it. This past few weeks also has been big for Linux gaming with new developments.
It started when this random video appeared in my feed. I am aware of openSUSE before but this SUSE parody video made me hop into this distro immediately. I am not aware that it offers both static (Leap) and rolling release (Tumbleweed) model. Not being in a rolling release for awhile now, I decided to roll down this path. The offline installer surprised me with a 4.6 GB ISO, which is quite big than typical size.
The reason for that big ISO file is the install process. It will let you customize your installation by selecting the packages that you want or remove. It is the most powerful installer so far which let you tweak a lot of things. In the disk partition section, the default filesystem is btrfs. Prior to installation, I have no idea about this filesystem. It is apparently the default for openSUSE for quite awhile and first to adopt it. This new information made me more excited since I have a new thing to delve into. More about btrfs here.
I tried KDE Plasma this time. I already used other major desktop environments but for some reason, I always overlooked Plasma. After some learning more about it, reading the documentation, checking the source, engaging with the community, the innovation, etc., I can say that I will stick with it for a long time, I like everything about it. The same can be said about openSUSE. It’s the current perfect match for me.
Two months in, I can say that I found that distro. Everything from the logo, wiki, forums, community, and the different ways of how it handles things is in my alley. Using Linux has been fun again for me after dabbling most of my time in Debian, Ubuntu and Arch based distros. I’m also using it with Wayland and PipeWire which seems to work fine with my current use.
It’s crazy how this journey started with a parody video. I know openSUSE don’t make a lot of noise in the Linux community, hence the small userbase but in some sense, I quite like it that way. I haven’t gone into detail about the features of openSUSE, I’ll let you have fun discovering about it.
“Don’t reboot it, just patch!”
Good anime comes with good OP and ED songs. Here are my picks for Winter 2021 season:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
After being on a specific custom Android ROM (aftermarket firmware) for a year, I changed to a ROM to fully use Google services for a game that needed it to run. I’ve been using microG which is an open-source implementation of Google services but has limited features and I can’t use it to sign in to the game. Three months in, the game has been updated and I can log in to that game without the need of Google services so here I go again wiping my device storage and installing another custom ROM but this time I discovered a custom ROM that’s been also utilizing microG built-in and has security and privacy features.
Enter CalyxOS. What separates this to other custom ROMs is that this has verified boot and cab relock the bootloader. This is a huge deal in terms of security as this prevents others accessing your information through fastboot. Most custom ROMs out there need to have an unlocked bootloader to function. This method is also being utilized by GrapheneOS, but in this ROM, you can’t use microG and most apps that require it will not function properly. CalyxOS circumvent this by implementing microG to make the device functional in most cases.
From their website, they describe the features as:
you are empowered by the combined expertise of the Internet privacy community
‘de-googled’ Android - does not put your data in google’s cloud or constantly report your location to google
you can make encrypted phone calls directly, using the built-in integration for Signal and WhatsApp calls
you are warned when you make or receive an unencrypted phone call
text messages are encrypted and a timer can be set so they disappear
advertising and trackers blocked via DuckDuckGo Browser and DuckDuckGo as default search provider
web browsing is anonymized via Tor Browser
built-in free “Virtual Private Network” services from trusted organizations protect you from being spied on
your phone is receiving regular, timely, automatic security updates
your data is backed up with strong encryption to your personal cloud server or to USB storage
At first, you can see that this is just another custom ROM with a bunch of privacy features as described above. The security feature of relocking the bootloader is really a big difference of it from other custom ROMs.
Almost a month of using it, I can say that it is very comparable to using LineageOS with microG. Very minimal features has been added from AOSP. This is also my first time using a device with relockable bootloader. There are some minor bugs that I’ve encounter but most of it has been recognized by the developers and their GitLab page is active.
As for the usability, since I’ve been using microG before, nothing has changed in this case. I still get most of my apps from F-Droid which like Google Playstore, but it is a repository of free and open source software for Android. My most used applications are:
AntennaPod: Easy-to-use, flexible and open-source podcast manager and player
Overall, I am having fun using it. I might continue using it until my device has stopped receiving security updates. I’ve been waiting for the first update of CalyxOS for my device to see if I will encounter problems.