What you think about this operating software? Pretty niche still, but if its alright maybe we could take the next step and use a almost open source os?
Personally I would love to see it gaining ground as I would love Europe to have its own phone OS.
Ubuntu Touch is German and Postmarket OS is european. I’m not so sure about Mobian.
I’m surprised to learn Ubuntu Touch is german, especialy since the main version of Ubuntu and their parent company (Canonical) is South-African.
Canonical gave up on Ubuntu Touch, but being open source some Norwegian guy decided to continue developing it anyway. Others joined in, leading to the ubports foundation. Canonical let them continue to use the name Ubuntu Touch and there is some continued cooperation, but Ubuntu Touch is completely independent from Canonical these days.
Late reply - I have been using SFOS as a daily driver for many years now, on a couple of Sony Xperia 10 III and before that an XA2 Ultra. Everything generally works, although I’ve had a few problems/niggles:
- I changed the ugly “defaultuser” username over to my name using some hackery
- Internet used to not always work with android apps (fixed)
- IPv6/DNS data leaks when using vpn/wireguard (fixed)
- When I plugged in iems/earbuds with a mic they would always have an annoying buzzing sound, I fixed it by setting up pacat to run as a systemd service (no idea why this worked). Funnily enough I’ve actually just reflashed SFOS today and this seems to be fixed.
- The keyboard on OSRS doesn’t work, which is probably an issue of not having play services/microg.
Apart from that it’s generally wonderful. The UI/native apps are miles nicer than Android or iOS, you really can’t beat Finnish UI design. It has a small but vibrant community of nerds who make apps for stuff (e.g. Whisperfish for signal or a native kdeconnect client too!) and most of the components are open source.
For native apps I use CHUM or the Harbour, they are generally more updated than the Jolla store and sometimes have better versions (e.g. file explorer with root).
For android I generally use f-droid and aurora store; I don’t use microg to save battery but you can if wanted/needed. Battery life is not as good as android but decent enough, it’ll last me a day of heavy use/a few of light use.
For me the selling points are you have a phone you can ssh into, way more freedom than android/ios for actually being able to tinker with it as it’s basically just a linux machine running a derivative of fedora, and the UI rocks. Plus I trust Jolla far more than a faceless corporation intent on harvesting all your data.
They did have some concerning things regarding Russian investment prior to the Ukrainian war but as far I am aware this has all been dealt with - they filed for bankruptcy then rebranded.
Generally speaking, if you want a Linux phone, you won’t find a better choice really.
If you have any questions feel free to reply/pm :)
seems great for a os thats not very popular!
all in all, what would you rate it against android? every app works on adroid right, so its a bit weird to go from there haha.
I like it far more than android mainly for the UI. It’s pretty consistent whereas Android seems to change every version. You get very used to the swiping to hide apps/go back to desktop/close stuff etc and it feels pretty natural rather than having to click that button to show all windows like you usually do in android.
For what it’s worth I don’t generally have any problems with android apps on SFOS and their implementation is pretty solid - It’s basically using LXC (Linux containers) to run the Android apps. It’s also pretty seamless compared to something like Waydroid (Although I can’t comment, I haven’t tried that too much).
I wouldn’t really be able to give a 1/10 per se but I ditched android a while back and don’t think I’ll be returning, if Jolla goes tits up then I would most likely be looking at another Linux phone, maybe Pinephone or something running PostmarketOS.
I think it’s good to view it as Android is something very established with a colossal dev team/manpower whereas something like SFOS or any Linux phone is more of a work-in-progress/labour of love. For that though, I would say Jolla have done an exemplary job and development is still churning along :)
