Sailfish OS 4.0.1 No Longer Support The Jolla Phone But Has Many Other Improvements

[Guest]

I was expecting them to drop the original Jolla phone years ago and I'm genuinely surprised they supported it for this long. Some will probably moan about how they should support it basically to the heat death of the universe, but they're entitled idiots and support has already been above and beyond of what can be realistically expected. Even the Android support isn't their fault as it requires new drivers from Qualcomm which are damn expensive and not available to Jolla anymore.

On top of what's mentioned in the article there's also stuff like firejail-based app sandboxing, a bunch of other open source software improvements and a host of quality-of-life UI improvements and additions.

Hoped this would be when they'd really start the migration to ARMv8, a.k.a 64 bit arm as there was already a start to that migration in 3.4. However thinking back at it, they probably had to deprecate the original Sailfish Phone, the only ARMv7 device with official support, before they could really move on with that without a huge duplication of effort.

This is the problem with trying to support ARM devices. Lack of proper closed source drivers unless you pay exorbitant amounts of money. Atleast on tablets they could've used Intel Atom SoCs with their nice open source drivers. But no, everyone's busy jerking off to their ARM fetish.

[Polleke]

Does the XA2 run the latest android now? Is it stable-ish?

With this update is thas support for Android 9 layer. A lot of apps run, but not all. Personally I only need Whatsapp and Firefox. I am hoping to get rid of Whatsapp someday, and Firefox is just my backup browser.

But please understand, you buy this phone with Sailfish OS because of the native system, Android apps are only an extra. Just like you don't switch to desktop Linux thinking about all the apps you want to run under Wine.

[Polleke]

is one better than the other?
speaking as an xa2 plus user...

I would think the XA2 has better support than the Xperia 10.
If you are looking for a new device, you might wait out if Xperia 10 II gets support with this final release, and how good it is. It has newer hardware and an OLED screen. I just don't like the formfactor.

[JacekJagosz]

I meant what's the added value? What does it do that others don't? What does it do better than others?

You mean Aurora OS? Right now it is primarily used by Russian government, but it is planned to be a consumer OS for Russian citizens, so it could be a great source of Sailfish OS compatible phones in the future. As far as we know right now it is not much different in consumer features from Sailfish OS.

And Sailfish OS is a cool alternative because it is very functional OS that isn't Android, which you might or might not prefer for your privacy. I personally adore Sailfish UI and that all native apps are so consistent with it. I love that I can use my phone with just one hand, because most is accomplished through gestures and not buttons in furthest corners of the screen. Also I managed to configure MicroG well enough that all Android apps work for me. Although they work much slower than on Android, when I just need bank app, messaging apps and Firefox as a backup browser this is good enough. High battery drain (with Android support enabled) and very small device support are the biggest downsides of Sailfish OS to me, once I got used to it.

[curfew]

Because every Sailfish X is a new hardware adaption, possibly a new android version.

This applies to all Android apps as well. Supporting a new display form factor equals to a "new adaptation". Supporting radically different resolutions equal to "new adaptations".

[Thaodan]

This applies to all Android apps as well. Supporting a new display form factor equals to a "new adaptation". Supporting radically different resolutions equal to "new adaptations".

No it does not. A hardware adaption is its own thing, read the HADK if you don't believe me.

[slalomsk8er]

I meant what's the added value? What does it do that others don't? What does it do better than others?

I can only speak for myself but this is why I think it's special.

I don't need pay a thousand bucks for a phone every 1-2 years.

There Is no crap preinstalled.

It can use my Nextcloud(WebDAV) to sync calendars, contacts and files without the need to pay for extra apps.

If I activate developer mode I get a Linux terminal, a ssh-server and root access. This alone is a killer feature as it proves that I'm owning the device. I can compile and run what ever I want. I guess I could connect a screen, mouse and keyboard and use it as a full desktop after installing xwayland.

I can send SMS from my PC over SSH:

$ ssh [email protected]
$ devel-su # not needed if you are in the sailfish-radio group
# dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.ofono /ril_0 org.ofono.MessageManager.SendMessage string:"+00000000000" string:"Your SMS Text"

I don't want to sync videos automatically to my Nextcloud so I use rsync.

$ rsync -avP [email protected]:/media/sdcard/0f094ac9-a065-40dc-aa42-4402c1ea424e/Videos/ Videos/

I can still use Android apps if I feel the need to say, do some tsumego or listen to audiobooks.

[L_A_G]

This is the problem with trying to support ARM devices. Lack of proper closed source drivers unless you pay exorbitant amounts of money. Atleast on tablets they could've used Intel Atom SoCs with their nice open source drivers. But no, everyone's busy jerking off to their ARM fetish.

I'd hardly call it a "fetish" considering there isn't much that's widely supported and fits in the smartphone/tablet power-performance envelope. Intel's low-power x86 just barely fit into it and it's Intel, a company known for highly anti-competitive business practices.

It's also more of a Qualcomm issue than an ARM issue as other SoC vendors are much more relaxed about it, but nobody else can offer the same range and particularly not the higher end of it. Apple spun their own ARM silicon to avoid being stuck with Qualcomm, their only other option after Samsung stopped selling their better SoCs to third parties.

[Guest]

I'd hardly call it a "fetish" considering there isn't much that's widely supported and fits in the smartphone/tablet power-performance envelope. Intel's low-power x86 just barely fit into it and it's Intel, a company known for highly anti-competitive business practices.

It's also more of a Qualcomm issue than an ARM issue as other SoC vendors are much more relaxed about it, but nobody else can offer the same range and particularly not the higher end of it. Apple spun their own ARM silicon to avoid being stuck with Qualcomm, their only other option after Samsung stopped selling their better SoCs to third parties.

Nobody else is offering better open source drivers, nor documentation and datasheets. Atleast in the case of Qualcomm, they're now officially contributing to and supporting Freedreno (along with Google). Broadcom is funding the development of open source GPU drivers for the Raspberry Pi. Other than those two, we have squat.

Plus, those efforts are more recent. Intel's provided great open source drivers for atleast a decade, so they were definitely the better choice for an open tablet device in the past 10 years. But, people kept running after ARM in a crazed manner, ignoring the one hardware company that provided amazing open source support. I mean, open source GPU drivers, video decoding and encoding, OpenCL, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. All of the fundamental shit is supported and supported well. We could've had amazing, functional devices instead of having to struggle with closed source drivers written for Android. They could've gotten useful work done, but all of these projects wanted to hit their heads against concrete slabs instead.

[L_A_G]

Nobody else is offering better open source drivers, nor documentation and datasheets. Atleast in the case of Qualcomm, they're now officially contributing to and supporting Freedreno (along with Google). Broadcom is funding the development of open source GPU drivers for the Raspberry Pi. Other than those two, we have squat.

Device vendors really don't care about if the drivers are open source or not. To buy SoCs to make devices based on them you need a license from the silicon vendor regardless if the documentation and drivers are publicly available. Open source drivers only matters to hobbyists who want to put other OSs on devices.

No, what's more relevant to hardware vendors are things like the task-suitability of available silicon as Intel didn't really make the low-power high-performance silicon that hardware vendors wanted due to the inefficient nature of x86 once you move into low power applications. In these applications Intel's Atom chips were either slow compared to ARM silicon in the same power envelope or then they were well beyond the power envelope of ARM chips with the same performance. Them being unsuitable for smartphone use also posed it's own problem as most tablet makers also make smartphones and making x86 tablets would mean that you'd have to make devices using two vastly different ISAs and thus have to duplicate a significant amount of effort for these two ISAs.

Let's also not even get into the fact that x86 was totally single-vendor here versus a myriad companies making ARM silicon. If Intel pulls out or decides to start abusing it's power as the sole x86 vendor in this space, a hardware vendor caught in this trap has zero good options. On ARM they can just switch to another vendor and all their code will run without as much as a recompile, which obviously isn't the case when the only escape is to a totally different ISA.

We're also talking about a space where Android, not desktop Linux, ruled the roost. While existing, Android on x86 always lagged behind ARM as Google couldn't be bothered due to a lack of vendor interest and Intel couldn't be bothered to make up the shortfall. Then at the end they just dumped a load of silicon at the market at cutthroat prices and when that didn't produce any real progress they just pulled out, vindicating vendors' decisions to not get tied to Intel's whims.