/e/OS, favorite tech 2025

Published December 27, 2025

While trying different mobile operating systems, I came across a really interesting option called /e/OS. I learned about /e/OS through its association with the Fairphone. I’ve been following the Fairphone from a distance because it’s the rare phone that’s designed for repair. I noticed that you can buy the Fairphone pre-installed with /e/OS from Murena (the developer of /e/OS). And if it’s good enough to pre-install on a phone, it’s most certainly good enough for me. Murena even sells refurbished Pixel 5s with /e/OS, and because I had one lying around, it was game on.

The Pixel 5 is the newest of my “old” phones so it has the best specs of all my cast-offs. It has 8 GB of RAM, a fast processor, great battery life, and a sharp display. It’s thin, measuring only 8 mm thick, with basically no camera bump. The screen has small bezels and the edges of the phone curve to match the corners of its screen which makes the screen feel edge-to-edge. I really like the shape, size, and the look of the Pixel 5. It’s an attractive package with hardware that has many good years left in it. But at only five years old, it won’t receive any more major Android updates. And since it won’t receive updates, it’s fair game to unlock the bootloader and install something else.

After installing /e/OS on the Pixel 5, I was struck with the polish of the home screen – in Android the home screen is called the launcher. The /e/OS launcher borrows heavily from classic iOS before version 14). Every installed app is on the home screen, as opposed to having some app shortcuts on the home screen while the rest are tucked away in the big list of all apps (the app drawer). You can drag and drop app icons into folders, and there is a dock at the bottom of the screen that holds four icons. Also similar to iOS 13 and earlier, widgets are restricted to the left of the home page, and shown as a verical list. It includes built-in widgets for app suggestions (much like Siri suggestions), weather, and Advanced Privacy (more on that later).

The first thing to do with a fresh install of /e/OS was to get the apps I wanted. Now this is a “de-Googled” version of Android, so it doesn’t come with the Google Play Store. Instead it has the App Lounge. The App Lounge is interesting because it has all of the apps from the Play Store, but you don’t need to be signed in with a Google account. It means that despite having a de-Googled experience, I’m able to use all my usual third party applications such as 1Password, Chase, Spotify, and Todoist. In addition to the Play Store apps, it has all of the apps from F-Droid, the open source Android app repository. I appreciate that open source and commercial apps are in the same unified interface. I have a mix of Play Store apps with open source apps, and I can receive automatic updates for both. It’s very convenient and without requiring a Google account.

A major feature of /e/OS is its Advanced Privacy features. And before I get into it, I need to describe what privacy means in this case. Here the privacy concern is that mobile apps collect data about your app usage (often called analytics). They do this mostly through well-known analytics and advertising services (e.g. Firebase and Admob). By default, /e/OS blocks connections to these services. What that does is prevent mobile apps from collecting data that can be used to track your activity across the web. The blocking and reporting of blocked attempts is referred together as Advanced Privacy. You can view which services were blocked and which apps attempted to use them in either the system settings or from the Advanced Privacy widget.

Taken together, it’s a great mobile operating system and all without a Google account. So what’s the catch?

I mentioned earlier about the App Lounge providing apps from the Google Play Store. I can’t imagine Google is happy about their Play Store apps being available on an unofficial platform. Additionally /e/OS includes something called MicroG, which is an open source alternative to Google Play Services. Google Play Services solves the problem where Android users all have different versions of Android. To smooth out the differences between the versions of Android, Google create Play Services, a set of features available to other apps that that can be delivered and updated through the Google Play Store. All of this is replaced by MicroG on /e/OS.

My main concern is that these are not supported use cases. Google has no interest in making sure this continues to work, and if anything, they will do things to break it. If there’s something keeping /e/OS and MicroG safe from retribution, it’s that the install base is so small. If /e/OS gained steam, Google may take active measures. And unless the European Union (Murena is based in the EU) is willing or able to step in, Google could break the App Lounge and/or MicroG.

To be fair, these issues have been true for the entire lifetime of /e/OS (since 2020) and MicroG (since 2015) and today everything works fine. But I have to mention my concerns about its future.

Conclusion

In my survey of alternative mobile operating systems, I’m looking software that lets old hardware do something, and that something may not be a full-fledged mobile experience for daily use. I’ve written that LineageOS is the best alternative mobile operating system because it’s available for a lot of phones. Installing it will often give you a newer base version of Android, adding years of modern software and application support. /e/OS doesn’t support nearly as many devices, but it adds some extra features and a level of polish that makes it attractive for daily use.

My primary phone is the Light Phone 2, but I still live in the modern world and need access to third party applications. This is especially true as more services require the use of a mobile app and make analog options (like a printed Metra ticket) less convenient. For these cases, I have a six year old iPhone 11 Pro which gives me access to essential apps. But the dual problem of future garbage and software precarity means that the hardware is not made to last forever and the software changes independent of my needs, beyond merely supporting my phone.

With my goal to only buy second-hand consumer technology, I’m thinking seriously about what that future looks like and its limitations. I’m looking for tools that enable this future for me. /e/OS gives me a commercial-free mobile operating system and it’s really very good! It’s a strong contender for my future smartphone OS, and I’d welcome it.

FreshRSS, favorite tech 2025

Published December 11, 2025

A mention goes out this year to the application FreshRSS, which I’ve been hosting on my Raspberry Pi computer for the last three years. What’s different this year is that I’m using the FreshRSS web interface. Previously I used FreshRSS as nothing more than a back-end for other applications, namely NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS. And as I look to disentangle myself from Apple’s platforms, I switched to using FreshRSS in the browser. Part of it is that I never found a good RSS application for Linux. There are a few, and I thought they were awful in one way or another, either looking like they were fresh out of 1999 or not working in a way that I liked.

As I used my Linux laptop more, I found myself using FreshRSS in the browser and then I bookmarked it on all my devices, and I really liked it. It even looks and works well on mobile. Normally I prefer a native application to a web application because I feel like it’s a waste of system resources to run a browser when I could have a native application running locally. In the case of RSS, it feels different because the content of all of it is web-based, so viewing it in a browser feels native to that content. When I open links from the RSS feed, I’m going to open it in a browser anyway. RSS feed items are all of the internet and on the internet and it makes sense to have it all in a web browser from the get-go.

This year in particular has required a different approach to media. My country, the great United States of America, elected a new (old) President, and this guy is far more interested in creating headlines and spectacle than running things well. He needs to be the center of attention for something every single week, if not every single day. And for the last 12-13 years that he’s been in politics, the mainstream media can’t help but play into it. Internet media drinks up traditional media and dissects it into thousands of tiny bits of re-packaged out-of-context twaddle. It’s not a sane person’s quest to sift through that, especially when the sifting is aided my algorithms tuned for maximum emotional reaction and engagement.

It’s more important than ever that I can pick and choose my sources and put them into a system that lets me manage my reading, group my sources however I like, mark news items as read to get them out of the way, or star them to reference later. It puts some control back in my hands rather than being the recipient of a feeding tube. And I find that control has been really healthy and wholesome.

And that’s why I give FreshRSS a 2025 Favorite Things honorable mention. Because of the capabilities of the software, which is very good and reliable, and also that the media landscape in which I live makes this kind of thing necessary.

Nintendo 3DS, favorite tech 2025

Published December 10, 2025

I’m a lifelong Nintendo fan, but I never gave much thought to Nintendo’s DS and 3DS. I was inspired by ProZD/SungWon Cho’s YouTube video Top 20 Nintendo 3DS games, which showed off a treasure trove of games that I completely missed, including series like Mario and Zelda that are otherwise must-play for me. So I went out and bought a Nintendo 3DS XL from my local GameStop this last April.

I also bought Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Partially out of brand loyalty, but also morbid curiosity. My impression of the game was that it was a remake of A Link to the Past with a new story that served to paper-over the fact that it’s a remake. And things I’ve heard and seen over the years suggested it’s not a worthy entry in the Zelda series (see Why Modern Zelda Sucks: A Link Between Worlds). But as it turned out, I loved it. My initial impression of it being a kind of remake of A Link to the Past was not entirely mistaken – it’s set in the same world as Link to the Past – but it’s its own game with all original dungeons, items, and mechanics. I enjoyed it so much that when it was over, I played through the whole over thing again on Heroic (hard) mode.

Another game I’m playing though is Super Mario 3D Land. 3D Land is the predecessor to Super Mario 3D World. Both games reuse the style of classic Super Mario Bros. games and translate it into 3D. Compared to 3D World, 3D Land is a smaller game. The levels are shorter with each level focused on a single mechanic or challenge (like platforms that appear in time to music). That makes it more of a portable game, where it’s designed for filling shorter slivers of time. The first play-through of 3D Land is enjoyable, but the levels are pretty easy, almost making for more of a visual demo of the 3D capabilities of the system than anything else. After beating Bowser, the special worlds are unlocked with soul-crushingly difficult variations on the regular levels. Between going back to get Star Coins that I missed in the easy levels along with fighting my way through the special levels, I’m getting my money’s worth of game play.

Lastly I’m playing Pokemon Sun. When I was around 9 or 10 years old, I played the hell out of Pokemon Red. But I lost interest with the Pokemon sequels Gold and Silver. Back then I had very strong opinions about games and the new Pokemon in the second generation rubbed me the wrong way. A few decades later, I’m enjoying going back to the generations of Pokemon that I missed since the first generation. The Pokemon formula is so familiar to me that it makes for a cozy game like the way people talk about Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. It gives me just enough fiddly tasks to keep me interested and feeling good.

Any of these games would make the list of my favorite things in any given the year. The fact that they are all on it is why I have to give it up for the Nintendo 3DS.

It’s a delightful game system with a great catalog of games. A truly portable system that fits nicely in a bag or pocket it a way that the bulky Nintendo Switch doesn’t. This thing sat in my blind spot for years despite the fact that I’m its exact target market. I’m grateful that I finally got back around to playing this system. I’m pleased with the game play I’ve gotten from it already, and I’m excited because I know I’ve only gotten started.