A question as old as time, I know.
I’m getting away from Google and I’ve done the easy stuff: CoMaps, Proton mail (I know, not the best move), aveslibre, etc. I currently don’t have the time (or the knowledge base) to learn how to self host, but hopefully that will replace Drive and such in the future.
But I digress. I’m looking at a new OS for my phone. I’m currently in a contract with a phone that is incompatible with alternative OSs. Graphene needs a Pixel. Used, they’re $150-400. /e/OS will run on a Motorola or whatever and those are like $80.
There’s also the option of going full Fairphone with /e/os and I like that idea in the future.
The internet people tell me that Graphene is the best due to ease of installation, privacy, and security.
I don’t need a lot of security. I just want Google to stop suckling all that sweet, sweet data from my teat.
What are your thoughts?
On Graphene now, I dearly miss simple Lineage features I used 10 times a day: the network speed indicator and long press power button for flashlight. I just assumed GOS would have them.
I browsed the forums and they’re not interested in implementing it. One answer was “buy a flashlight”
Even after a few months I still feel like going back.
I personally do not use long press power for flashlight, but your requirement got me curious, and I tried to replicate it.
This is doable, but seems to require more permissions. I downloaded KeyMapper from F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.sds100.keymapper/), and added a new key map with Long press Power trigger and Toggle flashlight action. However, this application requires Accessibility permissions (because you are overriding system maps ig), Camera (for flashlight), Network (I think it sends an adb command via wireless debugging to do the toggle) and unrestricted battery usage.
As for the speed data, from a surface level search, I found these two apps:
NetUpDown (https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.by_syk.netupdown): This shows a floating window (instead of the notifications bar) with the network speed.
Traffic Light (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.leekleak.trafficlight/): This displays the network speed as a notification, but shows the incorrect data for me for some reason.
Theoretically, it should be possible to just mash the functionality (/code) of these two to get what you want (thanks to open source).
A big thanks for doing all that research!
I had kind of a fix for the flashlight, but this is much better. KeyMapper is really polished, the icon doesn’t do it justice (I’m superficial like that).
I could customize the press duration, vibration, all good stuff. Only thing missing is a timeout.
I did have a bit of a weird behavior, with actions sometimes launched during button press and sometimes only after release. It seems to be fixed for now. For other users: I did grant root to the app but don’t know if it was required for this function.
Traffic Light is again a well made app, but it updates too often and I don’t like persistent app notification in the drop down window. I’ll give it a try though.