I hope it’s ok to post on this community. It seems to be the most active. Skip to the summary at the end if you are in a hurry.

Every time the issue with google’s dick move come up, I barely see any mention to Jolla/SailfishOS. Why is this not the Linux phone that we should be supporting?

I bought an Xperia way back in 2018 I think, and bought their community support and installed. It was usable. I ended up giving up on it because it was much worse than the ungoogled android alternative back then. The GPS took a long time to work, a lot of stuff was rough.

And some things were great surprises that comes with using a Linux phone. Syncthing android wouldn’t install, but then I just installed the normal Linux Syncthing like normal and it worked perfectly!

But now with google killing F-droid and such, even a rough Sailfish will be a better option. I didn’t stop using it because it was unusable, but because open source android was better. Open source android will die, and Sailfish must have gotten better by now.

So why isn’t it an option? One thing I heard people complaining is that they are charging yearly for updates. Is this the problem?

People, even the very rich and evil microsoft gave up on investing in their windows phones. And those massive companies can only do so by profiting a lot from personal data. Any company will need a massive investment to be an option. Specially until it gains traction, with a small user base, it MUST be very expensive. And we, who want to see Linux working on phones, must invest on it. Otherwise any company trying it will go bankrupt.

There are few of us, it’s a massive undertaking. Those of us who can must invest on it. Put our money where our mouth is. It’s sad, but the world runs on money. Linux was successful because massive companies profited from it and needed it. If Linux relied solely on donations do you think an average person could use a Linux desktop today?

And then there are those saying “it’s stupid to start from scratch”. Jolla didn’t start from scratch. They came from Nokia and have been building SailfishOS for more than 10 years. There’s a lot of work already done to be ignored.

And on top of it, it’s not an american company. So no PRISM and other things on it. Specially with the orange king, it’s a massive plus to have software free from their system, unlike AOSP, which can just forbid their use by any country the orange king doesn’t like.

So, why is it not an option? And those currently using it, what’s your experience? Those who bought Xperia and installed on it, how did it go?

TL;DR: Sailfish wasn’t ideal before, but with google’s dick move, that will be better than not having open source apps.

A phone system will be very expensive and we must pay the entry price to support it, if that’s the reason people don’t like Jolla.

Jolla has been on the market for a while and already did a lot of work. SailfishOS is not something from scratch, if that’s the reason.

Anyone using it currently, how has the experience been for you?

EDIT: I forgot to mention. Bank apps, Facebook stuff and other massive companies apps probably won’t work on Linux, nor degoogled phones, and never will. They are allergic to freedom and if you need them, an alternative OS is not for you. Just like Adobe never worked on Linux and probably never will. It’s not profitable enough. If that’s what you need, just accept google decisions because you don’t have a choice. This post is not for that audience.

Links from A_norny_mousse that I missed:

https://sailfishos.org/
company: https://jolla.com/
download: https://shop.jolla.com/ => Get free trial (yes it requires an account, but there’s no timebomb in the trial)
docs: https://docs.sailfishos.org/ (thanks to the community!)
forums: https://forum.sailfishos.org/
  • commander@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    13 days ago

    When it was a new thing, I was open to it, but since then same as other, open source portions makes it less appealing to me. Also I’m not clear on how easy it is to dock it and run regular desktop applications on it. To me that’s the second most important part of a Linux phone. Most important is how open source the operating system is. Second is interoperability with the common linux ecosystem of applciations

    • guismo@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      Yeah, the first one is the most important. The second is awesome, but personally I would say being usable as a phone is maybe as important as being open source, if the options are having a fully open source software, but not usable, or mostly open source but usable as a phone.

      Though I’m kind of not sure. It kind of really needed to be both; usable and fully open source…

      • commander@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        13 days ago

        I forgot about the phone part, lol. Ya that’s the most important part. That should be stable especially voice and data. I’d really prefer if people migrated to matrix chats instead of carrier based sms/rcs

        • guismo@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
          1·
          13 days ago

          And camera and GPS. If it’s just voice and text we could use a dumb phone.

          And then they could bundle with matrix and become common place. Like apple users think face chat (or whatever the name) is the name for video call, since it’s part of the phone and they never used anything else.

          But that’s kind of day dreaming…