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SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

sailfishos.org

101–110 of 173 posts

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#101
post #90

This is a mobile OS, right? I go to the homepage. Zero screenshots. I go to the User Experience page. Zero screenshots. I even go to Design Principles under the UX page. Zero screenshots. Talking about mobile phone design is like dancing about architecture. Show the thing or bust.

I type these words on my year old Sailfish device. I had 2 other ones for roughly 10 years altogether. The UI is astonishingly polished. It has not changed a lot for 10 years, but still nice to use. There is e.g. the tutorial video that comes installed on every device. Sorry, probably won't have time to share it later, I have a funeral to organize when I get out of bed. Maybe some other user can if it's not on Youtub…

Sony Xperia 10 series devices are still supported - including Xperia 10 V which is quite recent.

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#102
post #53
post #11

SailfishOS and the Jolla One were good (awesome usability) But the integration of Android was a horribly failure. It is like WINE, half working applications preventing native ports of quality. I left the boat. After that Jolla failed with the tablet. Then they didn’t deliver a successor device for Jolla One and provided SailfishOS only as aftermarket OS. You remember the Android problem from above? The hardware of ot…

Does anyone know if Jolla ever published the full source-code? The promised back in 2013.

Not openly published but they will send it to you on request.

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#103
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sailfish browser is using Firefox rendering core BTW, so you might have used it elsewhere. ;-)

From other comments in this thread though it seems to be stuck on quite old versions of ESR though. Seems like it took until about September 2024 to go from a mid-2020 version (78) to a late-2021 version (91) according to this [1]. I don’t have any first-hand experience but from the comment that linked that blog, and the site itself, it’s not clear whether the browser engine has been updated since… 1. https://www.fly…

Afaik the problem is the lack of embedding API in the Firefox core, so they have to adapt their patches every time they need to update Firefox version.

This is also why you see Chome being used as a core in all kinds of applications and frameworks - AFAIK it has the necessary API for this.

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#104
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I type these words on my year old Sailfish device. I had 2 other ones for roughly 10 years altogether. The UI is astonishingly polished. It has not changed a lot for 10 years, but still nice to use. There is e.g. the tutorial video that comes installed on every device. Sorry, probably won't have time to share it later, I have a funeral to organize when I get out of bed. Maybe some other user can if it's not on Youtub…

Sony Xperia 10 series devices are still supported - including Xperia 10 V which is quite recent.

It says there is no license for 10 V yet. Have not looked into the details for a long time, but I guess the reason for that is that it's considered beta with too many bugs / features not working?

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#105
post #98

This is a mobile OS, right? I go to the homepage. Zero screenshots. I go to the User Experience page. Zero screenshots. I even go to Design Principles under the UX page. Zero screenshots. Talking about mobile phone design is like dancing about architecture. Show the thing or bust.

Are there cheap devices running it (< €250?)

I guess you could get a (not much) used C2 at that price. Many users have given up. Ask in the forum.

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#106
post #84
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why games on Windows ship their own C++ Redistributable? Well, the same problem. And for the very same reason macOS app bundles come with a lot libraries and we still see a lot updates after every macOS release. A lot of known issues can be avoided with more experience and cooperation before changes happen. Before anybody mentions Proton. Because always somebody mentions Proton? Proton is WINE. But maintained by Valv…

> native ports Native ports have huge problems as well. Most of them are hardly maintained and stop working years down the road.

People say that. Don’t call out the bad examples (there are some!). The never mention the good examples?

    ioQuake3 - still work's
    CS2 - still works
    HL1, HL2, CS1,CSGO - still works
    Unrailed - still works?
    UT2003 - there it is getting hard, unmaintained since ca. 2003. But it is doable if you want it.
    Quake3 - same as above.
Most bad ports were made by inexperienced developers. And honestly, these people need to learn! Especially Windows developers which aren’t Linux users are causing the problems. Linking weird 3rd party libraries which aren’t itself is a receipt for disaster. Which indicates planing mistakes in early stages. A bad sign is when they start to package for specific distributions…run as fast as you can.

I would look to applaud the high quality work id and Valve or Daedalic. Weirdly Microsoft ships a port of Minecraft. Valve now ships the Linux-Runtime to ease ports. And Flatpak allows developers which want to package itself (weird hill to die on…) doing it.

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#107
post #70

Many years ago I backed the Jolla Tablet, which never shipped and they never gave me a refund. At the time the company kept pretending like things were perfectly fine with every update right until they let everyone know that the project was being cancelled. There was zero transparency and accountability, and from that day I vowed to never support this company ever again. I would've been fine if the project had failed…

Not just the lack of transparency, they went bankrupt after the tablet fiasco (never refunded most of the people) and bought by some investment firm connections to the Russian state (not the thing you want from a privacy-friendly product / system) what they tried to keep secret. AFAIK they have bought by some other company (again) since then, but they have basically nothing. Most of their Sailfish OS is actually clos…

And yet Sailfish is a mature mobile OS, sufficient in many cases to be a daily driver, and an essential EU-based alternative to the Apple/Google monopoly. So there's that...

On a more superficial front, the UI is far ahead of both iOS and Android. Complaining about it being closed-source misses the point: the platform is Linux, and other than the proprietary front-end, everything else in Sailfish is wide open to hacking and independent development. So there's that too...

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be silly, nobody wants that rep.

Techbros are bowing down to Trump and the rise of fascism in the US. Why don’t you think they would do the same for Putin the second the geopolitical winds turn around? Reminds me of a joke - paraphrasing: someone from the US is speaking to someone from the Soviet Union and at some point the conversation mentions Soviet propaganda. The US person asks “you have propaganda?”. (the punchline in case my terrible paraphra…

There’s a slight difference between whatever is going on in EU/US, even at its worst (and it’s getting plenty bad in the US!), and countries like Russia and North Korea. Attempts to make these sound comparable betray a silly worldview, that - coincidentally? - echoes RU propaganda points.

Re: SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

#109

I currently have hopes / am watching Apostrophy who are building on top of Graphene but at least they acknowledge that people need Google Play and are attempting to support that while not sacrificing the entire device to privacy issues. https://www.apostrophy.ch

Only Android needs Google Play. The thrust of this post is that there's a third alternative which is neither iOS nor Android - and that's a killer feature.

Now it's up to capricious EU leadership whether to support a sovereign OS, including mandating that banks and other institutions open up their requirements to use solely US-controlled devices.

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