Yeah, Chromecasts are much better than Fire TV’s, due to the more control you have over them and how easy it is change the launcher vs. Amazon actively preventing it. Basically same price and budget as well. Plus Google running a newer version of Android in general vs. Amazon’s, etc. Chromecasts are probably lesser of the two evils imo.
Pretty much unfortunately. The good thing is its trivially easy to change launchers on the NVIDIA Shield or Google TV devices, plus you can even go a step forward and debloat them entirely with ADB. Amazon’s really the only manufacturer I’d say that forces home screen ads with no choice around it, since they actively prevent changing launchers and such. But Apple is probably the only one out of the box with no advertising.
If you have the money, I’d go for an NVIDIA Shield, or maybe an Apple TV. Well worth the money.
Otherwise, for budget, you could get a Chromecast, which gives you more control over it and has generally less garbage than the Fire TVs do for instance, since you can easily change its launcher and debloat with ADB.
You can easily change launchers on the Shield and remove all of Google’s nonsense through ADB as well though, unlike Amazon who locks down the OS very tight. Plus like another commenter said, you can just flat out install LineageOS and you’re good.
I agree with you. Stock Android OSes include so much proprietary bloatware, spyware, and other garbage from OEMs and Google themselves, that its a pretty horrible experience. They don’t take privacy and security seriously at all, not even good from a usability perspective either most of the time imo, as it also leads to worse performance and battery life, etc. I would much rather use iOS over like any Stock version of Android, even despite the many problems of iOS.
Only way to make Stock Android somewhat usable is through removing what you can through ADB, but even that is far from ideal and won’t solve all of the issues.
Overall though, by far best option is to just use an alternate Android OS like Graphene, beats iOS or Stock Android any day. Though between iOS and Stock Android, if I had to pick, I’d easily choose iOS.
I’m not sure if it could be done without at least compromising security to some extent (at least in Android’s current state, but maybe that could be changed or worked around in the future), but yeah, overall I do agree, that’s what I was trying to get at. I definitely support there being an official and easier method to root on Android, as long as it isn’t the default, and as long as the risks are clearly explained. People should certainly be able to do whatever they want with their own devices, it is unfortunate, and definitely an overstep from Google and OEMs.
Not having root is done on Android for some very good security reasons to be fair, it opens up a giant attack surface and risk for all kinds of malware and nasty stuff to take advantage of. I don’t think it’s done completely in malice as you think. Its a very important part of the app sandbox and Android’s security model at large.
With that said, I do think that people should have the option to root if they want to, I’m not a fan of OEMs like Samsung and whoever else purposely preventing people from rooting at all costs. I think people should be able to do whatever they want with their own device, root just certainly shouldn’t be the default, and users should be aware of the risks if they choose to use it. But I do think it should be a possibility for those who really do wish to do so.
With Android, it all just comes down to the OEM and variant of it that you’re stuck with. As a whole, I think its an amazing project and OS, though unfortunately Google, and especially OEMs, tend to make a lot of bad choices. It’s similar to Linux as a whole in that aspect. You’ve got options like ChromeOS which are a nightmare for privacy and user freedom any way you look at them, but then you’ve got your traditional distros like Debian, Arch, Fedora, etc, which are the exact opposite. Its an important distinction.
Why not get the flatpak?
Security concerns. There’s a lot of debate over it, but from the research I’ve done, I believe the Flatpak of Firefox is less secure, since it seems to remove part of Firefox’s internal sandboxing, and relies heavily on Flatpak’s sandboxing.
Basically makes it easier to compromise your data within the browser (like cookies, site data, passwords, etc), but maybe harder to get to the rest of your OS.
I just prefer using the rpm of Firefox with Firejail, as that keeps Firefox’s built-in sandboxing intact, while adding an extra layer similar to Flatpak to restrict it further. Best of both worlds.
Its great and has a lot of potential, I like a lot of what it does. I just wish they had packaging easily available for Fedora/RHEL through a COPR or the like. Also would’ve preferred if they used a stable release vs. the ESR of Firefox as the base, but I can understand why.
with hardening out of the box
Floorp definitely isn’t hardened out of the box in my testing. Only thing it does is seems to disable Firefox’s telemetry, which is nice, but more hardening is certainly needed through other projects like Arkenfox (which work here on Floorp too). Also looks like Floorp makes it easier to toggle some privacy settings that you’d usually have to tweak the about:config for, and comes pre-installed with uBlock Origin, which is great.
I think overall my only concern with Floorp will be how well and quickly the developer can keep up with updates. The track record for now looks good, but only time will tell. Besides that, this is a good and very promising project, will definitely keep an eye on it.
Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:
Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.
Well said. May be worth reading through this GitHub issue and this Bugzilla issue as well. Its worth noting its also directly integrated into the browser as well in about:addons.
I’m personally not a fan of Firefox/Mozilla integrating and using Google Analytics, even under these circumstances, and think it does deserve criticism, but it is what it is I guess. I do hope they switch to a better alternative in the future.
In the meantime, setting the following about:config options should take care of and fully strip out Google Analytics and extension recommendations from about:addons:
“extensions.getAddons.showPane” to false
“extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled” to false
“browser.discovery.enabled” to false
“browser.discovery.sites” to be empty
You’re off to a good start, I’d recommend reading through and following this guide, its the best resource out there at the moment for Linux hardening/security imo.
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Yep, they’re horrible. I always disable internet on them, uninstall any apps I can, and generally do what I can to avoid using the built-in smart TV, but I shouldn’t have to do this, its unfortunate and sucks to deal with. They just take advantage of consumers who don’t know better, wish the TV market wasn’t like this. :/
Its just a huge shame too because Brendan Eich is such a smart guy (creating JavaScript, co-founding Mozilla and Firefox, etc), so sad to see how distorted and awful his views on basic human rights and the world are.
“default-release” is your default profile for the Stable release of Firefox.
“dev-edition-default” is the default profile for Firefox Developer Edition, so I’m assuming you had that installed at some point.
“default” to my understanding is only there for legacy reasons. It used to be the default Firefox profile way back in the day, but now that there’s so many different Firefox versions (Stable, Beta, Nightly, & Developer Edition), using the same default profile for all of them across editions would cause corruption and a lot of issues. So that’s why Mozilla moved to “default-release” for the default profile on Stable Firefox, similarly Developer Edition makes its own profile, “dev-edition-default”, as would Nightly, Beta, and so on. I’m not really sure why “default” is still included, its probably safe to delete, at the very least it can be safely ignored.
I 100% agree, its best to just stick to upstream Fedora imo. Glad you made this comment. The security issues of Nobara always put me off, especially since basically everything it does can just be applied to regular Fedora. I think Nobara would much better serve as a script or toolkit, similar to Brace, or something along those lines instead of an entire separate OS with the security issues it brings.