That is really disappointing... I understand the dev wanting to move on to something else after 10 years, but it would have been nice to not do it so abruptly.
Currently, I'm not aware of any good alternative to Mull...
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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I find it frustrating that no discernable effort is being visibly made to pass this project on to another dev or group of devs.
Just unceremoniously announcing it's going down. After a successful fundraiser at the beginning of this year.
I don't know where the funds went, nor do I understand the abruptness of the closing of the project. I'm suspecting that this is a ragequit. Something happened somewhere quietly that led to the developer deciding that they cannot maintain any longer.
This is, in short, quite disappointing.
To anyone; if you do respond to this comment; do not try defend them. Instead, try to provide more context, or evidence that shows I have misread the situation. Arguing about how long he worked, or how passionate he was in the past, does not change the current facts. Provide more facts if you must argue.
It's a quite entitled view to take that they should make an effort to pass the project on. It would be very hard to build sufficient trust in a new developer quickly, and passing it on without that trust would be undermining the trust that users of the projects have placed in this dev. If I were him, I wouldn't be staking my reputation on finding someone to take over from me if there wasn't already an obvious candidate.
The successful fundraiser you mention looks to have had a target of $12k USD (from: https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/divestos-is-unsustainable-needs-community-support-we-sent-250-and-you-can-help-too/6660, the original page has been taken down), and was as a alternative to them taking a full time job. I'd say its a reasonable bet that money was spent on living expenses, and IMO $12k a year is much less than this level of skilled work is worth. It's certainly not enough money to make it unreasonable to shut down the project a year later, and I doubt anyone who donated feels shortchanged by it.
Hmmm, back to Fennec I guess for us the Mull users?
I'm So sad i loved mull and the divestos project what sad news
Crap... Mull was my main browser :(
Fennec is maintained by Divest developers Tad as well
I guess you can say they...divested from DivestOS.
In all seriousness, I'm gonna need to find a new browser.
See also the discussion on the Privacy Guides forum: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/the-end-of-divest/23396/
So fork it...?
sad to hear it. used mull as my primary browser, and wanted to switch to divestos from calyx. I guess not anymore, then :/
Why would you want to switch?
to be honest I don't have a list at hand, but one of the reasons is that (I don't remember which of the following) either they are more friendly to root users, or they are more friendly to those who don't want unattended automatic system upgrades. I had to disable the updater app like disabling other apps for it to let me stop updates happening without my approval, which I want for 2 reasons:
- the occassional downgrades and breaking changes coming from upstream google engineers
- calyx not using the
addon.dthing for some reason so Magisk does not get automatically installed to the upgraded system's boot partition, which technically is also kind of a breaking change
maybe I have read something about built-in features as well, but I'm not sure about that. it was a few months ago when I was reading up on this.
NOOOOO!!!
Damn, that's rough. What are the alternatives to Mull?
I suppose Fennec is the next in line
did they comment (maybe I missed it) on why they're ending development?