How does Murena's custom /e/OS compare to Google's Android? - my answer on Quora

[tehdastehdas@piefed.social]

An introduction for normal people looking for an easy way to avoid U.S.American and Chinese software and hardware on their phones. "Easy" seems to be important to Murena, which /e/OS delivers - I dare to recommend it for beginners.

I've been using /e/OS for 1.5 years as a lazy enthusiast and hobbyist with previous experience with various Linuxes, Android, and CyanogenMod (predecessor of LineageOS). I have set up GrapheneOS once. I will probably try CalyxOS when I get around to it.

The answer is hidden from Quora's question page - I quess they hid it because the links triggered their bots to assume it's spam. A few upvotes could bring it up and maybe into people's feeds.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-Murenas-custom-e-OS-compare-to-Googles-Android/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

[jlow@slrpnk.net]

I recently heard someone being angry at Murena because they had some problems with their Seedvault backup and Murena now trying to make money out of that. Can't remember the specifics, I think it's ok for them to have users pay for using their backup servers as long as you can just use your own. Is that how it works?

[neo2478@sh.itjust.works]

I've been using e/os for about a year now. Besides when you first set up the phone when it asks if you want to log in to a murena account, I have not seen anything else in the phone about it. Everything works like normal. Even seedvault with whatever source you set up. In my car, my NAS.

[tehdastehdas@piefed.social]

That's how it works. Paid Nextcloud storage capacity is probably Murena's main income (the first gigabyte is free), and the other one is phone sales. They fork reputable open-source solutions to make them even easier in /e/OS, but the forking introduces new bugs and complaints.

They seem to have introduced some incompatibility with their Seedvault fork:
https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/backup-and-restore

Warning: Backup only works between /e/OS devices: it can only restore a backup it made itself, on a phone that already runs /e/OS — never data from Android, iOS, or any other system. It also only works with a Murena Workspace account, and needs the Passwords app to store its encryption key.

I guess if you skip that and install regular Seedvault, it would work normally.

Nextcloud is indeed self-hostable. Seedvault goes inside it, or elsewhere.