I believe it’s usually that they attempt to use some of the parts in the Google Play framework that is (currently) not fully supported by the Google compability layer in GrapheneOS, but the developers does an amazing job on trying to keep up with stock AOSP changes and make apps work equally good as on a stock Google image.

That, and sometimes just checking whether the phone is running an image signed by Google and refuses to run if not.

Personally, I’ve only had issues with one app, and that’s Pushover (a push notification service). It tries to use Google Play for notifications and I refuse to install that for this single app.

I know what you mean, but it’s not what you said. :-)

Just wanted to point out that they still have monopoly on the enterprise side of organization infrastructure, which is huge - the number of companies running production systems on self-hosted Linux infrastructure are orders of magnitude fewer than those that don’t, even if the number of Windows servers in total might be fewer.

Microsoft gets paid per employee, per application suite and per cloud service (if Azure is involved for the AD) - not only per server. They were very early on the recurring subscription model almost every SaaS provider is leaning into nowadays, even for on-prem stuff.

Not really. Almost every Windows-based organization over a certain number of employees will use some shape or form of Active Directory (whether on-prem or in Azure) and most likely also Office 365, which is corporate/enterprise infrastrucure that is really hard to migrate away from once you built your IT and processes around it.

All the license fees for just retaining access to and being able to onboard new employees in that infrastructure is a huge portion of the budget for these organizations.

They just gave up the war on competing with UNIX/Linux on the non-enterprise production infrastructure side, since there were no money to be made there.

https://wiki.servarr.com/

The fact that they do not store any customer data was put to the test in 2023, when the Swedish police raided their offices and left with nothing.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-search-warrant-customer-data-not-compromised

They also spend a lot of time and resources into researching and advancing technology around measured boot and running as much as possible in memory, without having to use disk storage.

@Sibbo@sopuli.xyz @hsdkfr734r@feddit.nl You’re right, sorry for that! Will update it asap

Epic Games (lolwhat?) bought it in 2022, but sold to Songtradr in 2023. The latter seems to be some kind of music license broker.

If you are using Paypal, log in to Paypal and go to Bills. Select Spotify and scroll down - there should be a link to cancel the subscription at the bottom.

GP probably asked whether Mull was shortname for the Mullvad browser.

I really hope there’s nothing dodgy going on there

In 2023 they got a 1.1 million SEK fine for breaking the law that regulates working hours. To “allow” (strongly encourage) your employees to work nightshifts you need a collective agreement approved by the union, which they didn’t have.

More recently, they got a 500 million SEK fine for skirting the anti-money laundering regulations in Sweden.

But at least I’m not giving them interest on anything I buy. Always make sure I’m paying my stuff on time, and no postponed payments.

The whole “buy now, pay later” deal is a credit loan. They are most likely paying the merchant directly and using your loan as collateral to speculate on the market, until you pay them back for that loan. If that’s true, they are making profit on the interest gained from your loan.

I’m guessing their business model is to exploit people who have issues paying on time and to collect interest and late fees, as well as receive convenience fees from stores implementing Klarna as a payment option.

Correct. Like all credit banks they promote the “buy now, pay later” option before direct payment, which is becoming a pandemic on our society. Hardly any user interaction needed. They also offer their own payment plans which encourages buying even more expensive items you cannot afford.

A tip is to host your own domain at an e-mail provider that allow you to receive e-mail for any recipient in a single mailbox (i.e. catch-all or wildcard), and use the following alias format when signing up at different websites or services:

<website>@<yourdomain.tld>

This allows you to filter incoming e-mail by which website/service you signed up for, regardless of what domain they send e-mail from (it can be different for account notifications vs newsletters etc.).

It will also help you detect if they have sold your contact details or had a data breach without announcing it publicly, since you wouldn’t use that specific e-mail alias elsewhere.

+1 for Njalla

Good point! The details for each app are crowdsourced and can be submitted via the instructions here. However, the default templates does not include any mention of root status.

The maintainer of the site can be reached via any medium listed here if anyone would like to suggest updating the templates to include root status.

Thank you! Updated the post with a link to this resource.

DivestOS sounds interesting but I am wary of any “mission-critical” software project (such as the firmware for my primary phone) that relies on a single person, for multiple reasons. Burnout and potential for social engineering by malicious actors being two of them.

GP:s comment made me curious as well. Usually, if multiple hardware vendors are supported there are separate branches with different maintainers. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the main codebase is bloated as a result.

For those that are looking to install GrapheneOS and want to ensure that their banking apps work as intended, here is a curated list of supported apps per country:

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/

CPU vulnerability mitigations would typically be distributed with the intel-microcode package for Intel processors on Debian-based distributions, for example.

And QubesOS isnt based on linux kernel. It uses Xen. Linux is used in the Qubes aka VMs.

The dom0 is very much running a Linux kernel, the same way your domU:s are typically running Linux kernels (although you could probably run any kernel in hvm mode).

As an example, here is the documentation on how to manage updates for the dom0 kernel:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-install-software-in-dom0/#kernel-upgrade

They went crying about WPEngine having found a good business model around Wordpress support, and started sabotaging for them.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/2/24260158/automattic-demand-wp-engine-revenue-wordpress-battle

Looks like they lost in court a few days ago!

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/10/24318350/automattic-restore-wp-engine-access-wordpress