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Note: Linux phones are notoriously insecure (source)
yeah, now I am not buying it lol. I wanted a daily driver not a phone for some habit :(
For most linux users I'd say less security is a necessary evil. Security hardening is a tradeoff and I'd guess most people dont want their systems to be as locked down as ios or android. Or even modern MacOS, there are quite a lot of modifications that will require you to turn of System Integrity Protection, which blocks modifications of system files in normal use.
Note: Linux phones are notoriously insecure (source) but please correct me if you know better
A few points
Operating systems like Android and ChromeOS have full system mandatory access control, every process from the init process is strictly confined.
Android uses SELinux for mandatory access control as per their own docs
As part of the Android security model, Android uses Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to enforce mandatory access control (MAC) over all processes, even processes running with root/superuser privileges (Linux capabilities)
As for ChromeOS, it's built upon Linux and that blurred line between Chrome and Linux is being completely removed --> hello Linux And ChromeOS aka LACROS
To make matters worse, some system daemons are not designed with permission control in mind at all. For example, PulseAudio does not have any concept of audio in or out permission.
PulseAudio is due to be replaced by PipeWire which
was designed with a powerful security model that makes interacting with audio and video devices from containerized applications easy.
https://github.com/mikeroyal/PipeWire-Guide
There's also Wayland, which is being written to replace X11. It has better security
Wayland isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability for both.
While it's true that many apps aren't designed with security in mind, flatpak and snap packages have their portals API. The author did mention that they are underutilized, but that's slowly changing.
Additionally, immutable distros (nixOS, Fedora silverblue) do exist, which make it quite hard for unauthorised applications to modify root partitions since they are mounted as read-only. Mobile NixOS is still in its infancy, but it's being worked on.
In conclusion, security on linux isn't hopeless, there are solutions being worked on, and improvements in linux phones will benefit all desktop users, unlike distros like Android and ChromeOS that build custom solutions that aren't contributed back to the community.
Unless people pay for the hardware and software development to happen, Linux phones will never be as feature complete as Android or iPhones, so people will not buy as many, so the prices will not go down.
Also, I gotta disagree reeeeaaal hard with the sentiment in the comments here that Android is Linux since you can slap a terminal on it. Excuse me, but where's the GNU?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html
https://f-droid.org/packages/tech.ula/
I've had great fun using userland to put gnu into my android, ran windows, tried to use a phone as a portable dockable computer.. it's so close, but not quite ready for a daily driver
I will give you that, even as an Android disliker, this is pretty cool. Not for me maybe but its cool how portable these environments can be.
But how much software is ARM compatible though? Since Android is also free and open source (Google apps are closed and has closed aspects), I donβt see Linux phone ever being cheaper than they would otherwise be running Android. A 200-400$ Android phone today is basically a year or two old or just garbage.
Honestly, I disagree about cheap android phones being shite. I have a redmi note 10 pro and it genuinly is a very impressive phone especially for the money. I bought it new when it came out and it wasn't expensive at all.