Is Calyx OS a grift or on the right path?

[mika]

@starkle

No you haven’t. I checked.

Please see:

@mika

Providing a better-privacy OS for Fairphones, which are very appealing for folks with certain ethical and environmental goals.

@mika

There are also circumstances where one may want an alternative to Grapehene for whatever reason. [… check full post …]
This, naturally, put me off of Graphene until he stepped away. I hadn’t installed a custom ROM in a over a decade and needed a place to ask questions. The Calyx community was wonderful.

Calyx supporting extra devices and preferring the community are two use cases for choosing CalyxOS.

@starkle

It’s not about my priorities, it’s about the Calyx institute’s stated priorities of making phones private. It’s a solved problem. GrapheneOS exists and is very good. It has shortcomings, like limited hardware support. An alternative option that addresses those shortcomings would be a “good” alternative. Calyx doesn’t focus on those shortcomings, and as a result fails in their own stated goal.

Calyx’s stated goal isn’t “beat GrapheneOS,” it’s essentially ‘be more private than stock Android’. They succeed at that goal.

@starkle

Say I had the goal to make phones private. I fork AOSP, work really hard reimplenenting a small fraction of GrapheneOS features, and start collecting donations. You could say I’m succeeding in making phones more private and bringing another option to the table. You could also say it’s a big waste of everyone’s time and money because GrapheneOS already exists and I could have just forked or used that instead. But if I port my work to a couple non-Pixel devices on a whim, suddenly it’s not a waste of anyone’s time and money. That’s roughly how I see this conversation around CalyxOS.

As far as I know Graphene asked Calyx not to use any of their code. Also, as has been discussed repeatedly, CalyxOS is not the only thing the foundation does.

In any case, I’m glad CalyxOS exists both for the rare cases where it meets someone’s needs better than Graphene and in case Graphene goes sideways or ceases to exist for some reason. I learned the ‘I don’t need alternatives’ lesson with Bromite a few years back.