I use M-DISC (not all blu-rays are M-DISC) for backing up important documents.

I doubt it. Even the article claims that there’s been no news about layoffs since July. No mentions from laid off engineers online either.

July isn’t “days before”, unless you’re really stretching “days”

Yes, especially if it’s your first distro and you haven’t learned habits from non immutable distros. Distrobox and flatpak cover most, and technically, you can install other stuff with rpm-ostree, at the cost of some space and longer update times the more you layer on.

Supported by the Linux kernel, so it works out of the box.

I picked unRAID to be able to mix disk sizes. It also requires little maintenance in my experience, so that’s also a plus.

Flatpak works just fine, as it installs to the user directory and not any immutable part of the filesystem. Any non-flatpak apps can be ran in distrobox.

I love distrobox.

The immutability is the main difference. If something gets messed up, on boot you simply change to the previous image and you’re back up and running again.

I use Duplicacy, personally. All you need to backup is your home directory since it’s immutable.

A terrifying/infuriating/interesting watch.

I use last.fm scrobbling so it can learn what I like and provide suggestions based on my locally hosted music.

This is what this user does, for the record. They don’t care about anything anyone else says, they must be 100% correct or they turn to insults. You may want to block them if you care about actual discussion.

Depends on your definition of "smart’ I guess. ZigBee stuff like buttons and the like probably won’t become obsolete for a long time. I guess you could argue that ZigBee protocol updates could eventually brick them though. Good thing a lot of it is open source

I just hate that Mapillary is owned by Facebook.

You should not use a phone with preloaded graphene without first checking the hash. It’s also kind of insane to charge $50 for it, when Graphene’s web installer just has you click buttons to install. You can even use another phone to do it.

It doesn’t require an internet connection at all unless you want to update the firmware on the cameras 🙂 Oh, and I guess to view the web UI you’d need a LAN connection but it doesn’t need to connect to the full internet.

Frigate and Reolink are a good combo. Frigate is absolutely fantastic and can detect objects, sounds, and/or save clips and recordings to your pool. There’s really nothing better imo.

Regarding the system partion and verified boot, it’s the fact that it isn’t the only thing one would do with root that breaks verified boot. You totally could package su in the ROM and ship it, but if a user installs something else to the system with it, it is very likely that the verified boot hash would change, unless I’m missing something.

OTA, as of right now, needs to hash the device to prevent system corruption. I don’t think it’s a very simple problem to solve, or surely there would be a ROM out there that does fix it with root. A better fix would be a package manager, but that’s not going to happen with AOSP.

Regarding #1, it’s fundamental to AOSP, and not any particular ROM. Similar to the OTA issue above. It’s not just graphene (which, technically, you can root fyi, but I really would not do so, as again it defeats the purpose of running a verified boot secured phone).

#2 is debatable, because it’s also highly dependent on the distro and configuration. As an example, immutable distros (which are actually closer to Android than non-immutable distros) make it so sudo/root isn’t needed very often, if at all. Fedora CoreOS, for example, can run package updates on a schedule without user intervention, use rootless containers, and do verified boot. It can be deployed from a single file and validate itself after the fact, meaning a user would never be prompted for a password at any point. Obviously that’s not a 1:1 because it isn’t made for PC usage, but other distros based on Fedora Silverblue and the like can be more secure than standard Linux for similar reasons. Everything is generally sandboxed (flatpaks and containers) and root is rarely, if ever, required.

That being said, if you’re not concerned, there isn’t anything stopping you aside from your phone’s manufacturer, which I’m sure you’re aware of. I’m fine just knowing that I could do it, and much prefer the security benefits of verified boot and proper sandboxing above all else. I don’t trust Google to properly patch zero days related to rooted phones, let alone patch the ones that affected non rooted devices.

Android does not have the same security model as desktop Linux. I made a comment about this above (which you probably can’t see due to .world being defederated with who I replied to), but if you don’t want to go to my comment history, it’s summed up as three or so main issues.

Rooting breaks OTA updates since it modifies your partition hash, meaning rooted users tend to leave security holes open way too long. Android does not have a package manager for you to be able to update these issues individually.

Android does not expect users to have root access, so they do not even consider it in the design. Android sandboxes apps, and apps can only generally have permissions that you grant, with no direct access to the kernel. However, rooting adds an entirely new attack surface for which there are no protections whatsoever. Desktop Linux, on the other hand, does expect users to need root level access from time to time. That’s what sudo is for, but you should not confuse this with switching your user entirely to root and doing everything as root. There’s a reason that’s not recommended on Linux: it’s dangerous. The same thing applies to Android. On top of that, Linux has other tools and protections designed to make running as sudoer safer, and Android has none.

Finally, it breaks your ability to use proper verified boot. If your system partions silently get malware installed, there’s generally no way for a user with a rooted phone to notice. Verified boot protects against this, but because rooting (along with whatever else you’re running as root) changes your partition hashes, it will either stop booting or revert your changes.

If mobile Linux ever takes off, it will likely be very similar to desktop Linux and be designed with root in mind.