Will LineageOS be officially supported?

I wonder what fairphone officially thinks about this great success? @Douwe

I mean, I can understand if they have other priorities than supporting the development of alternative OSes for the fairphone.

But I imagine something like an official option to install the lineageos from within the fairphone (maybe with a warning that the os, which is going to be installed, is a community-development and thus fairphone can’t support people with problems with it officially) and leave the development with the community.

Technically I don’t know if this is possible, to start a installation of a different os from within a os and have almost no more user-interaction, so that even non-technical fairphoners could install for example LineageOS.

If this would be possible, this would definately pay off for fairphone as well! Never, seriously never underestimate the power of the community! #wearefairphone
I guess this could be also one more reason for people to buy a fairphone in the future.

And like I have written before in this thread, LineageOS seems to be the perfect solution for a secure and longliving fairphone.
It’s aditionally based on android, so you include the biggest app-market. But it’s not android, it symbolizes to me more the freedom (of the original linux) than android would/could ever do! :wink:

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I think the next step would be to make the Fairphone 2 an official LineageOS device, with builds downloadable from lineageos.org .

There was also an Android app that allowed you to install CyanogenMod on your phone (if it was an official CM device). Don’t know if this is still available for LineageOS.

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I don’t think FairPhone will jump on this train immediately. They can support MM for quite some time. But at some time in the future they will have to decide. ATM it doesn’t look like they will get an official Google OS on their phone, as Qualcomm will have abandoned the chips and the support. Then LineageOS and the likes will be the only way left

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I have one additional FP2 from Douwe for thees purposes. Testing and bugfixing.
Since GMS-Android is no option for me, i concentrate in first line on SailfishOS. On the second line i concentrate on FairphoneOpen and LineageOS.

The LineageOS seems to run very stable oob, i alredy informed Douwe about the gr8 success. The next step is, that the Fairphone Guys officialy support this.

For me it would be better to support LineageOS instead of FairphoneOpen.

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I think you both (@explit & @Stefan) are right about the next step(s), cause I think there is nothing wrong about it to try to make it an official LOS device and to wait for an official statement from fairphone at the same time…

I want to say one thing does not rule out the other, because FP won’t complain, when their device will be a officially LOS supported device and I guess to be an official device the LOS-team won’t need an official “go” from fairphone.

or am I wrong?

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Really? You can’t imagine that a company called “Fairphone” that started as a movement to tackle conflict minerals and has since produced the first ethical and modular smartphone, has other priorities than supporting an admittedly awesome community port?

But I’m with you in the hope that FP will officially support Lineage OS. They should just base OpenOS on LineageOS.

Btw I’ll move this discussion, since it’s not about porting.

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I might be hearing some voices saying that Lineage OS is just great for Fairphone 2, so why should Fairphone continue the development of their Open OS? Although it might be fair to let the community decide which way to follow, decisions in development would not be made anymore by Fairphone themselves but Lineage.

Fairphone should keep on improving their product and let each user decide which (open) OS to use.

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I’m not familiar with LineageOS, apart from the fact that it is derived from CyanogenMod. I do not know the latter that well either, except it is more open than a Google Android, but less than ReplicantOS.

So, how open is LineageOS compared to the current Open OS? By “open” I mean the proportion of open-source compared to proprietary blobs.

What are the main differences?

Folks, I do not get the point:

There is Fairphone Open OS based on “Marshmallow”, and there is Lineage OS based on “Nougat”. Now that “Nougat” is proven to run on Fairphone 2, why not upgrade Fairphone Open OS to be based on “Nougat”? If some guys want to stick with Lineage OS, then be it. But why not take the experience to port Lineage OS to Fairphone 2 and work on a new basis for Open OS?

Take into account that the more people will use Lineage OS, the more meaningless Fairphone Open OS will become. And what if Lineage OS someday would become closed source and Open OS would be no longer up-to-date just in favour of Lineage OS? What would you do then??

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Exactly the same.​​​​

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Nobody denied that this might happen, but:
Right now FP only has to maintain one OS (plus a derivative with slight [but important] changes). If they now created a new Open OS based on Nougat then they’d have to maintain two OSes, so almost twice the workforce needed.

An easier option for FP would be to (semi-)officially support Lineage OS by providing all the needed firmware updates, blobs and whatnot as well as the code for FP apps like checkup and the proximity sensor tool to the (community) developers of Lineage OS or - like I suggested above - to base FP Open OS on Lineage OS.

There is no company behind Lineage OS that can be acquired by G%§$e in a hostile takeover and even if something like that happened then the FLOSS-enthusiastic developers of Lineage OS would fork it and continue development under a new name.
Also theoretically the same could happen with FP Open. Both FP Open and Lineage OS are unfortunately released under the permissive (as opposed to copyleft/viral) Apache license, which means that neither project is guaranteed to stay FLOSS forever.
AFAIK that’s what happened to Dashclock Widget. The app is no longer actively developed but now there are closed-source forks on the Play Store.

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Propietary blobs are hardware-depended. They will be always there. In google os, in FairphoneOpen and in Cyanogen mod (Lineageos) until the chip-producer Qualcomm will opensource them.
All other parts are open source.

LineageOS is much better than FairphoneOpen. Its developed by a big community around the world and its based on Android 7.1 and it has many new features, which FairphoneOpen lacks.

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If you say so, the fate of Fairphone Open OS might be sealed… :pensive:

Perhaps, but I don’t see Fairphone Open OS getting based on LineageOS or ditched in favour of LineageOS anytime soon.

  1. LineageOS still has its problems on the Fairphone 2, although the progress and the perspective of it are really exciting.

  2. Fairphone as a company have a lot to do right now already. Switching support from the Fairphone Open OS they have established processes and a known need of resources for right now to a new OS altogether might not find many friends there :slight_smile: … And if the community gets LineageOS to work 100% on the Fairphone 2 like it seems they will be doing, then what’s even the point for Fairphone to do anything about LineageOS? When LineageOS finally fully works, Fairphone could work with the community on integrating it as a choice in the Updater App or stuff like that, but that is nothing to allocate resources to right now.

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Agree… Supporting an own Operating System is much easier than supporting an open source project…

But: The Last LineageOS which i test now on FP2 feels much, much, much better than Fairphone Open.
So i see no reason for users to install FairphoneOpen when they want an Google-free and OpenSource Experience. LineageOs is newer, fresher, has much mor feature oob and i wouldn’t say it has more bugs than FairphoneOpen

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I personally see three reasons currently, and I don’t claim to see everything :slight_smile: :

  1. No encryption with LineageOS.
  2. No FM Radio with LineageOS.
  3. Questions about Dual-SIM support with LineageOS.

Sure, not everybody needs those … but just to say.

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Agree. Dual-SIM works. FM Radio is nice to have (maybe it will be fixed)
Encryption might be important for some people - i hope it will be also fixed in the next versions.
I never used encryption because its very difficult (sometimes impossible) to access data on encrypted device. Not only for a bad guy, who has stolen my FP2. Also for me it can be problem, when the system refuse to boot. I prefer to have a possibility to recover data fast, in case something is wrong with the Handset.

But, this is a personal decision of everybody

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.4. No Proximity Sensor Recalibration tool & Checkup Tools
.5. For now: No support for Xposed
.6. For now: No official support from FP nor from Lineage OS - if you run into a problem you can only hope for help from a forum.

There are probably more, but I’d argue there are just as many or more to switch to Lineage OS already.

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I agree with you. I’m looking from another perspective on it.
Well Xposed doesn’t run on Android newer than 6.xx Its Xposed Problem, Not LineageOS one.
As a SailfishOS PowerUser i count only on me and on community if i have any problem.

But an Enduser need Support for Software. Also open Software. Its quite unusuall, that a company give support on AOSP Build.

Usually, u can install it, but when you install it - you get no support. I don’t know, how it lokks like with Sony.
As a Developer Program User you can download and Install AOSP Builds for the Xperia Devices, but i think, they are out of official support.

So the FP2 End-users who are Fairphone Open oriented have luck, that FairphoneOpen is an officially suported OS. I think this is something good and unusuall.

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I support this and would love to see official LineageOS support from Fairphone. No need to develop an own Android version then.

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