/e/, a Google-free fork of Android, reached a milestone this month with its initial ROM release. It's available for download, so you can kick the tires, with nightly builds delivered via OTA (over the air) updates.

El Reg interviewed the project's leader, Gael Duval, in the summer. Duval launched and led the Linux Mandrake project. Back then it was called "eelo", but has morphed into just /e/ – which autocorrect features won't try to turn into "eels".

The project is significant in that the European Commission recently noted how few people switch platforms. If you're on Apple or Android today, the chances are you will be on the same platform, plugged into the same "ecosystem" of peripherals and services, in 10 years. So it wants more variety and competition within the Android world.

/e/ derives from LineageOS, itself a fork of CynaogenMod, so it can run on around 30 phone models including the Samsung Galaxy S7, and several recent-ish OnePlus devices.

KaOS 2018.08 is August 2018's ISO snapshot for the independently developed GNU/Linux distribution inspired by Arch Linux and built around the latest KDE technologies. It ships with the most recent KDE Applications 18.08.0 open-source software suite, as well aas the KDE Plasma 5.13.4 desktop environment and KDE Frameworks 5.49.0, all built on the Qt 5.11.1 framework.

"It is with great pleasure to present to you the August release of a new stable ISO. With almost 70 % percent of the packages updated since the last ISO and the last release being over two months old, a new ISO is more than due. No major changes this time to announce, as was with last ISO, just the usual large package movement," said the developers in the release announcement.

A few years back there were a lot mobile OS systems, we had Symbian, Blackberry OS and IOS among many others. Google entered the market with Android, although it wasn’t an instant hit, they gained huge momentum overtime.

Part of Android’s success was definitely due to its open source nature and the massive customisation it offered. Android somewhat bridged the gap between budget and premium smartphones at that time, because it enabled so many functions on budget devices, it was truly something back then.

With time Android became a behemoth in mobile OS, but along with that Google was also benefitted. The OS used Google Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google Play, YouTube and a lot of other customary Google software. This meant huge AD revenues but also privacy concerns as it’s well known that Google can pull out a lot of usage data from Android devices.

Also: iPhone to Android: The ultimate switching guide

• Sailfish OS Nurmonjoki is now available

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• /e/ first beta soon to be released

  Next week, on Tuesday or Wednesday, we will release the first beta of /e/ mobile OS.

  I will then describe choices that have been done, what’s in, what’s not in, what remains to do, what to test and how. And probably a challenge for testers.

  [...]

  Of course we cannot support the 17K+ known Android devices. As the /e/ ROM itself is forked from LineageOS we can build for all LOS 14.1 (Android Nougat) supported devices, and not yet for LOS 15 (Android Oreo) supported devices (work in progress).