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

engadget.com

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

#121

Post by sangnoir »

realusername wrote: post #120
sangnoir wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 And…

> CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big communities

So you agree that there is an AOSP open-source movement? Nevermind it's harder to create a ROM than a Linux desktop distro because drivers are not mainelined by OEMs, but even this will be resolved by the HAL from Android P onwards.

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

#123

Post by BubuIIC »

csydas wrote: post #115
BubuIIC wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I strongly disagree. I never used an android phone with google services. Apart from the mentioned unique apps I never missed anything from the FOSS ecosystem. Often the free alternatives are vastly superior over their google counterparts. Also I told all my family and close friends who only grumpily got a smartphone recently to not bother with creating a google account but just install F-Droid. I only got good feedback.

The real benefit here being that there was never any case of malware found in F-Droid. So you really can just tell someone to play around and try out what they like.

Anyway, just listing some of the definitely not student level apps:

Firefox (Fennec and Klar/Focus), OsmAnd, K9 Mail, Nextcloud + Davdroid, Newpipe, Riot, Conversations, Telegram, a bunch of good quality Hacker news, reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Github, etc. clients.

All these with clearly marked tracking/advertising where present at all.

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

#124

Post by fghtr »

dingo_bat wrote: post #53

Instead of an alternative OS, we need a company that will make good hardware (comparable to Samsung) and not lock down their android system and provide open source drivers. That will satisfy most tinkerers, since they can modify anything they want and even load their own images since the drivers are open source. Android as an OS is good enough. Just that every single manufacturer has opted to lock it down.

There is a couple of attempts:

https://neo900.org/

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

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

#125

Post by larkeith »

shmerl wrote: post #14

Purism are working on Librem 5, which should apparently run Plasma Mobile. But Sailfish has by far the best UI out there. It's a pity they still didn't open source it yet.

I thought the Librem 5 will be running a mobile version of PureOS?

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

#126

Post by technobrat »

"But many, including Engadget, found the interface to be needlessly complicated and confusing." This and I noticed that the pulley system really slowed me down when trying to accomplish a task with the device. On an iOS or Android device one can achieve frequent tasks quickly without looking but not the same with the pulley system. You can't go too fast when pulling down.

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

#127

Post by subway »

maheart wrote: post #68
forgotmypw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the OS natively support? Does it have SMS, email, and a browser? Maps?

* SMS - yes * Email - yes * Browser - yes -- the official one browser is based on [an outdated] Gecko engine. Unofficial browsers based on QtWebkit. * Maps - yes -- the official solution these days is HERE Maps (this requires Android support which is available on Jolla-supported devices). There are several other Map solutions available through OpenRepos (a popular 3rd party repository for Maemo/Meego/SailfishOS softw…

Calling HERE "officially supported" is a stretch. It's a downright painful to use app running in the android container.

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

#128

Post by skykooler »

maheart wrote: post #68
forgotmypw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the OS natively support? Does it have SMS, email, and a browser? Maps?

* SMS - yes * Email - yes * Browser - yes -- the official one browser is based on [an outdated] Gecko engine. Unofficial browsers based on QtWebkit. * Maps - yes -- the official solution these days is HERE Maps (this requires Android support which is available on Jolla-supported devices). There are several other Map solutions available through OpenRepos (a popular 3rd party repository for Maemo/Meego/SailfishOS softw…

The official browser is actually Webkit based. I believe Maemo was the last OS in that lineage to use a Gecko browser (microB).

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

#129

Post by andrewclunn »

fghtr wrote: post #124
dingo_bat wrote: post #53

Instead of an alternative OS, we need a company that will make good hardware (comparable to Samsung) and not lock down their android system and provide open source drivers. That will satisfy most tinkerers, since they can modify anything they want and even load their own images since the drivers are open source. Android as an OS is good enough. Just that every single manufacturer has opted to lock it down.

There is a couple of attempts: https://neo900.org/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

The Librem 5 is desktop linux, just with mobile accessible UI. This is the future. THere's no need for a "mobile only" linux.

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

#130

Post by wicket »

Is Sailfish really the viable alternative we are looking for?

Back in the 90s we suffered from Wintel dominance where if you installed Linux on a PC, it was likely to be a less than pleasant experience due to missing drivers, etc. The modern day equivalent to Wintel is Armdroid. Despite Android using the Linux kernel, you can't just take an off-the-shelf Android phone and run a Linux distro of your choice. ASOP (Android Open Source Project) forks the Linux kernel once and then virtually all Android OEMs create a second fork of the Android kernel fork, apply their own changes and barely anything ever lands in mainline. Jolla's strategy to run Sailfish on top of Android kernel forks with Android blobs inherits the same problems of Android, encourages bad practices of Android kernel development, planned device obsolescence and the throw-away culture when the kernel fork reaches EOL.

There are further problems with Sailfish. It is built on top of the Mer, a Linux distribution built for Tivoisation. Mer refuses to use GPLv3 licensed packages. Mer packages are stalled on the last versions that used GPLv2 before they were relicensed to GPLv3. Most of these package remain unsupported and unmaintained for years and are probably vulnerable to many known exploits.

On top of these problems, Sailfish contains many closed components and the majority of Jolla is owned by Russian investors. Is this an OS that can really be trusted?

Fortunately the situation is starting to change and there are real alternatives which may be usable in the near future. There's PureOS which aims to build a Debian-based OS for the Librem 5 phone on top of mainline Linux, postmarketOS supports mainline Linux on a few devices in addition to Android kernel support, and now there's Maemo Leste which is built from the ground up to run on mainline Linux. These projects are still in their infancy but at least there is hope for the future. Sailfish, unfortunately, does not look like it will be part of that future.

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