Revisiting SailfishOS
17 points by Aks
17 points by Aks
I think that sadly Jolla's interest in bringing alternatives in the mobile market has dwindled in favour of focusing on more moneyed options in car infotainment and personal AI assistants.
In the past two, three years I've barely seen any improvements to Sailfish OS, despite a full blown new device launched for it in the form of C2. The Xperia 10 IV and 10V images have not been released a year after being promised, and the C2 is the only one that seems to get the new updates the company releases. As an Xperia 10V and 10III owner, I'm a little disappointed.
Similar situation here: I bought an Xperia 10 IV when it came out expecting Sailfish support to be just around the corner, but have been stuck with Android since. By now it'd also be pretty painful to make the change, though I do want to.
C2 came at an inopportune time as my 10 IV is still fully functional and has no issues really; I don't want to buy a new phone just because.
Further corroboration @ Xperia 10 V. It mostly does the job fine & the Android layer really smoothed out issues with a less-than-stellar app selection (tho WhisperFish is a pretty good native Signal client)—& the issue with bank apps & the like are still an issue on any custom ROM or root access anyhow so I just don’t use them. I was hoping that the IV & V beta support meant better support was around the corner, but really they feel like alpha support with how much of the IO isn’t working (no camera, no headphone jack, GPS often doesn’t work, power percentage doesn’t work properly). Many of these are pretty low-hanging things probably, but there doesn’t seem to be much priority.
One of the bigger issues tho is being stuck both on Qt5 as well as Firefox 91. Much of the Qt development has moved on to 6 which seems to have caused some headaches. Choosing Gecko over the Qt Webkit offering is interesting & admirable, except it seems getting version upgrades has been a massive PitA with some non-employee doing the last port. A lot of content online is starting to break in this browser—including trying to upvote here on Lobsters—just due to things like browserslist ticking with time & support being dropped even if what a website is doing doesn’t really warrant or require the most modern web platform features (or the polyfills / progressive enhancements get dropped when a few bytes could have kept the browser ticking well enough). But at least I get access to userStyles.css since it is really Gecko…
At least once I disable 5G, I had no normal connection issues.
I have long argued that Jolla should double down on being the Fediverse phone.
This would be cool, but a broader net into the general federated space than being ActivityPub-leaning. I think this would be bring a power user & free software appeal that tends to attract FOSS devs building tools to flesh out parts they are missing & then releasing for free which helps make it feel like there is more support & activity while bringing community. Currently the things are still hit & miss where you are more likely to reach into the F-Droid store than OpenRepos. …Or with my bias, embracing Nix since it already has the most ARM packages built already that, so long as you don’t need a UI, work really well (tho often package maintainers are more specific about optimizations targeting cortex-a55 for better efficiency instead of the lowest common denominator for aarch64-linux).
really they feel like alpha support
Same impression here, to the point that I've never bothered installing Sailfish OS on the 10V, not to mention that they they clarified that the eSIM XQ-DC54 version that I ended up buying is not supported with the eSIM capability and has to be used in single SIM mode - which was the main deal breaker.
I am a Luddite that refuses to use eSIM on principle. I sometimes will move my SIM to my backup Android if I need it, & I need the ability to swap it whenever I damn well please. I also generally refuse to using Bluetooth for audio & will only buy phones with headphone jacks for similar reason where the analog option just does the right thing immediately & clearly—which is ironic that the phone supports Bluetooth audio but the jack isn’t set up right in the kernel to work (plugging in put audio out of the ear speaker & the device doesn’t show up to PulseAudio).
I am a Luddite that refuses to use eSIM on principle
Until now, so was I, but the 10V model with a second physical SIM wasn't available in the region where I bought it from, so that's why I ended up with the eSIM version. :)
Oh this is fresh on my brain too. I just landed in another country & was shocked that a major international airport did NOT have cheap SIMs available on arrival like in Asia. I asked around a bit & was looked at silly like “why wouldn’t you just get an eSIM”, but I guess I am the outlier in all of this. Just like it will remain WebAuthn & not passkeys—or chatroom instead of group chat. Ha.
Damn - SailfishOS, been a while. Have like 2-3 devices with it installed lying around. Was fun, but the lack of progress and some needed functions made me switch again.