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Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

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Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#111

Post by exadeci »

chupasaurus wrote: post #98
gue5t wrote: post #3

Companies providing operating systems is a clear conflict of interest. Evidence: the tragic state of the entire mobile ecosystem, where no hardware can be fully utilized by (or even make calls with) an open-source OS. This article also fails to mention Tizen. Has it been abandoned? It was absolutely terrible (millions upon millions of lines of the worst C code I've ever perused) but I thought it still existed, making…

Purism is making a phone on top of usual Linux distros (i.e. they are tinkering with Debian Buster on dev boards) with only open source drivers.

Unfortunately, they've been underdelivering their products so far.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#112

Post by maufl »

I have an Sailfish X, but I don't use it anymore. Unfortunately, even the build in apps lack features I want/need, and so in the end I would have to use all the Android apps again.

* The Mail app does not support GPG

* The Chat app does not support any modern XMPP extensions or even group chats (this is because Telepathy does not support it)

* The Calendar has no month view if I remember correctly

But I really wish Sailfish was usable for me, I would prefer to have a "real" Linux distro on my phone.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#113

Post by dingo_bat »

fisian wrote: post #84
TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps like Netflix and snapchat and many payments/banking apps will refuse to work. I cannot find a way to explain this except dev incompetency and/or hostility towards users. - Netflix: "we see you have root, we can no longer trust our DRM on your phone". - Snapchat: a service whose core principle was always, "you can send your nude photos to each other, the photos are ephemeral, and they won't be able to save them…

And why do these then work on desktop computer without checks like: Do you have the latest (windows) update installed? Do you have an Antivirus installed, which we approve of? etc. (I'm not referring to Snapchat but the banking things here) It seems to me that they never cared when on desktops and suddenly on mobiles there are all these problems.

Because if your banking website is designed properly it won't rely on the client to ensure security.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#115

Post by csydas »

BubuIIC wrote: post #107
realusername wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android is Open Sourced Only partially, the ASOP does not run on anything because of the vast amount of blobs and basic drivers missing and people are maintaining open-source reimplementation of the gapps to make even the most basic apps working.

https://f-droid.org/ has a catalouge of ~1500 apps which have absolutely no dependencies on the proprietary google play services. Those few proprietary apps for which there are no free alternatives (spotify, duolingo) seemed to work fine without the play services.

Not to be dismissive of what f-droid does, but a large majority of the applications available might be generously described as a student's end-of-year project, and often are not very good.

This is not to diminish what is being done, as I do appreciate the option of a wide array of OSS items decoupled from the Google eco-system, but it's nowhere near independence from Google's eco-system. I would hardly say that it's a replacement so much as a novelty at the moment, even though there are a few absolutely golden apps to be found there. (Free advertisement for PassAndroid, the Android equivalent of Passbook from iOS, which does exactly what it advertises)

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#116

Post by als0 »

diminish wrote: post #109
catwell wrote: post #104

I have never really liked any of the major players. I used to run WebOS on a Pre3 for a long time. Now I have a Jolla C, but it isn't my main phone because of its poor battery life, so I also use an Android phone. The saddest thing here is those alternative OSs innovate a lot. WebOS in particular was years ahead of both iOS and Android in terms of UX (after all they had Matías Duarte on board... [1]). Sailfish is mor…

Would you say that latest WebOS has still features which are years ahead of for both current IOS/Android. I mean are there features which aren't implemented in some form in by those two mobile OSes?

There was a mechanism whereby you could transfer the current web page (or video) on your phone to your tablet, simply by placing the phone on top of the tablet. This was back in 2011. I think the Handoff feature in iOS is similar (although not proximity based).

The HP WebOS devices had wireless charging. It took many years for this to properly appear again in the market.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#117

Post by chupasaurus »

exadeci wrote: post #111
chupasaurus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purism is making a phone on top of usual Linux distros (i.e. they are tinkering with Debian Buster on dev boards) with only open source drivers.

Unfortunately, they've been underdelivering their products so far.

The reason for that is a rapid increase of orders as shown in their last report [0], as well as only 15" laptops are not shipped in full.

[0] https://puri.sm/posts/librem-laptop-orders-now-shipping-with...

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#118

Post by opencl »

xorcist wrote: post #100
A2017U1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is not available on fdroid anymore. There's a fork called Fennec that brings it into line with fdroid policy. There's also Icecat. To get Firefox without being forced into a Google account use Yalp installer.

Firefox Klar, which is an official Mozilla project, is available on F-Droid. There's some added content blocking stuff but otherwise it's just Firefox.

Klar/Focus is a completely different thing from normal Firefox, it's a Webview wrapper with very limited feature set (no tabs, no sync, no bookmarks, no extensions, etc).

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#119

Post by sangnoir »

realusername wrote: post #106
simonh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True of course, but: 1) Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems. And 2) They wouldn’t be any easier for them to solve, so why not concentrate efforts an solving it on AOSP which already has an ecosystem? Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve these issues, what chance do the others…

> Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android. Android needs blobs for absolutely anything. And you don't need an equivalent of the Gapps on Linux, it would be like something as common as systemd would be proprietary. > Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggli…

> Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android.

Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better than Android, by definition.

> The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning

This is flat-out wrong. GApps were never part of AOSP- or open-source.AOSP included alternative open source apps that offered similar functionality (like a mail client)

> AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.

Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-source movement.

Re: Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

#120

Post by realusername »

sangnoir wrote: post #119
realusername wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any other open source OS would have exactly the same problems Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android. Android needs blobs for absolutely anything. And you don't need an equivalent of the Gapps on Linux, it would be like something as common as systemd would be proprietary. > Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggli…

> Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android. Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better than Android, by definition. > The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning This is flat-out wrong. GApps were never part of AOSP- or open-source.A…

> Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better than Android.

Android has one kernel per phone people patched for their own needs, it's much worse than that. You can't take your kernel on a Samsung Phone and run it on an HTC. I can run my Linux kernel on most computers without much issues, good luck running an Android kernel on a random phone.

> Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-source movement.

CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big communities. You don't have that many communities because maintaining an Android ROM is much much harder than maintaining a Linux Distribution. That's why the compatibility list for CopperheadOS is ridiculously small.

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