F-Droid Basic (FDB) is recommended for DivestOS, but what’s the best way to install F-Droid Basic?
Use the included F-Droid to install FDB, then disable F-Droid? Will FDB be able to update itself then? What about for users who don’t have F-Droid installed by default, or have already removed it?
They say this as a generic warning on every F-Droid app listing, but it doesn’t apply to downloads of F-Droid themselves. If you install via that site it will self-update.
you should not install f-droid basic. f-droid now has unattended updates too (so what privacyguides says about basic is misleading by leaving that out), and who cares about the “attack surface reduction”? and the dev behind divestos (@SkewedZeppelin) probably wouldnt recommend using that anyway, thats why they preinstalled fdroid and not basic.
My guess would be that there are quite a few people on this forum who do.
Also, you don’t really present any meaningful arguments to support your claim that people should use F-Droid over F-Droid Basic. If there’s nothing that F-Droid does better than F-Droid Basic, and it would only increase your attack surface, I see no good reason to recommend F-Droid over F-Droid Basic.
I would imagine it’s also due to the fact that F-Droid Basic only supports Android 13+ and DivestOS has support going back to Android 7 [edit: not true]
I still prefer Basic’s more minimal approach, because I don’t need an app store to also do a bunch of other things on my phone.
Where do they say this? Or just because changes get upstreamed to the normal app later on? My understanding is that it’s a testing ground kind of in the same sense that Fedora is a “testing ground” for RHEL — i.e. they still consider it stable, it’s not a testing ground like Chrome Canary where maybe it’ll just randomly crash for example.
@jonah
Basic was originally meant to be for whitelabel usage and was turned into a testing ground for eg. sdk bumps after a few years.
It has only kind of taken the place of “F-Droid Light”.
Well I know it has dedicated maintenance and is in use in production since CalyxOS & F-Droid (Sept 2023).
I don’t know if we agree on what “testing ground” means here. It’s no question that F-Droid Basic receives things like sdk bumps, new installer logic, etc. before F-Droid (that is part of the appeal). But those changes are still considered stable, it isn’t like you as a user are beta testing an unstable F-Droid release on your phone by using F-Droid Basic.
I’m just saying they do position it as a stable/longterm choice alongside F-Droid proper.
okay, weighing choosing to install f-droid basic over f-droid is one thing. recommending people disable f-droid on divestos and install f-droid basic is completely different. i just don’t see the justification.
It’s probably unnecessary, but I don’t think it’s harmful to replace it either, as long as the DivestOS Repository is added to whichever client you use.
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