Comment by odeckmyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by odeckmyn | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to add a perspective from actual daily use, because a lot of this thread sounds theoretical.

I’ve been using a Murena/Fairphone running /e/OS as my primary phone for a while now, and honestly the experience has been much smoother than I expected. My banking apps work, GPS/navigation works reliably, messaging and everyday apps behave normally — I’m not constantly fighting the device or giving things up. After the initial setup, it just feels like a normal smartphone, except noticeably quieter in terms of tracking and background noise.

What surprised me most is that this isn’t a “privacy experiment” anymore. It’s a usable, stable daily driver. I still get the convenience people worry about losing, but with far fewer ties to Google services by default.

I think a lot of people hesitate because they assume moving away from stock Android means breaking essential apps or living with constant friction. That hasn’t been my experience at all. If you’re curious but unsure, it’s genuinely worth trying — the barrier is much lower than it used to be, and you might find you don’t miss as much as you expect.

I can vouch for your experience as mine has been the same, also on a Fairphone on which I installed /e/OS. I could have literally written the same comment myself — em-dash usage included!

It's not just an OS, it's an /e/OS.

Yeah, it's an OS that gives a browser error because it thinks the name is a path.

Yes, their choice of name was not their greatest achievement.

it was supposed to be a temporary name, that i believe was intentionally chosen to be bad to make it easier to replace later. they were under pressure because the original name eelo had a trademark issue.

when they eventually found a new name "murena" it appears they then decided to use it as a brand for the phones that they themselves sell instead, keeping /e/OS as the name for the operating system

What is their connection with eels?

I just checked and Murena is an eel, too. Imho, one of the ugliest fish one could choose as a mascotte :S

heh, i never made the connection. it's spelled muraena but that's as close as eelo is to eel.

curiously i always thought morays look cute.

Yeah, it makes searching for bug reports/help rather troublesome

I too have used Fairphone + /e/OS for years and have had literally zero issues with it.

Same here! I've not had any compatibility issues when using /e/OS on a Teracube 2e. It's a smooth experience all along.

This account has three comments on HN, all of them essentially the same type of /e/OS advocacy pablum.

"I wanted to add a perspective from an LLM sockpuppet, because I know you're all not deeply cynical and mistrustful yet."

so what? Am i supposed to comment on subjects know nothing about ?

It's pretty strange that the only subject you seem to have expertise in is e/os. Over a year and that's the only thing you've felt comfortable in discussing?

and so what? should I ask for permission to discuss something? it's crazy how omniscient people are aggressive on the internet. Is that your normal behaviour IRL??

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I think this is behavior that should be encouraged online. Staying quiet and letting the experts talk to increase the signal to noise ratio is a GOOD thing. OP has hands on experience with something that is at least for now quite niche.

I used to only really speak about node.js topics because that was what I had real fighting experience with, at a scale beyond what most webdevs had ever seen. Those were also my most upvoted posts by far.

I get what you are saying, and if that's what the OP was doing I'd somewhat agree with you.

However, if you haven't already, I'd encourage you to read over their past comments. They all read almost identical to the start of this thread. Before this post they had something like 3 other comments on HN and they were all about how great /e/OS is. All of them have a blurb about the privacy focus of /e/OS. They all read like copy from marketing.

That is bizarre commenting behavior for a niche OS. And these weren't comments about using /e/OS, but rather comments speaking positively about using it.

Your posts on node.js, I assume, weren't all "Node.js is the greatest programming environment I've ever used. It's so smooth and fast." Instead, I'd wager your highly upvoted comments contained useful information about using node.js.

I'd also say, that there are people that work for various software tech companies who post here. The best comments I see almost always start with "Full disclosure, I work for X". Those are far better received.

My account has more comments than that and I share OC's opinion and experience. I've been daily driving /e/ since its FP3 era and lately the experience has been really well polished. Even things that had been "tricky" in the past, like Android auto integration, now work seamlessly.

same here, except for banking apps. the one i am supposed to use now doesn't work.

As long as banking works with web browsers, I think the future looks good for this usage, but I could de-bank my phone and still have plenty of useful things to do with it.

the problem in my case is that the authentication for the banks website requires an app, and that app doesn't work. i am locked out of online banking for that bank because of it. (they also have a windows app that i could not yet get to work on linux/wine)

Ugh. I'm locked up with my bank because of my mortgage terms and being one day forced to install a spyware on my phone really scare me.

Find a new bank. Mine has another problem, so behind they don't support mfa beyond a symantec program I've not heard of before. I don't use it, but can't use my yubikeys either.

I had this problem and it turned out to be an upstream issue with MicroG which was eventually patched. If you have an error message you can search for existing issues on /e/OS' gitlab/forum.

Revolut stopped working for me for a while with the error that the bootloader wasn't recognised and rooted phones aren't supported. After about a month an OS update solved it.

My banking app doesn't even work on the last 3 android phones I tried because it wants a very up-to-date OS which basically means non-Pixel phones more than 2 years old need not apply.

So FP3 is shipped with the /e/ or you need to install it manually?

It didn't come installed and the FP3 isn't sold anymore so you'll have to install it. It was dead easy though, not anywhere near the complexity of installing Lineage back in the days (though that's gotten easier too).

/e/ on FP3 has been my daily driver for 1.5 years and my daughters run it on their FP4s with no problems at all.

Murena have been selling Fairphones preinstalled with /e/ OS. I think right now its the FP6 and FP5 they do.

https://murena.com

Its not only Fairphones. I'd say they've got an interesting mix of tech there. I think they even sold refurbished pixels flashed with /e/ for a while.

I have used /e/OS for years and it's been good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would second their experience, works well for me

Tbh I am using /e/OS as my daily driver and I fully agree, it just works. Bonus points for the Nextcloud integration which I can tie to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance.

I do not understand all the negativity, I think it is a solid alternative in the ecosystem, and choice is a good thing.

Happy owner of an /e/OS phone for the past 3 years here. I'm going to replace it for a Fairphone in the near future because I broke the camera on mine, and I'll take the /e/OS version without question.

I also recently switched from an iPhone to a Fairphone with e/OS and can say that I absolutely share that experience.

This is an astroturfing account.

It is weird they only discuss e/os. Does look like it.

Astroturfing kills any trust I had in e/OS.

You're assuming a lot: That it is astroturf, then that the account must be directed by eOS itself and not some enthusiastic user or third party. Or to be really conspiratorial, an adversary who makes obviously astroturf positive comments in order to sow doubt about the project.

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