Comment by sergiolp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergiolp | Hacker News Reader

Three days ago, a Jolla C replaced an iPhone 5S as my main phone. To be fair, me using iOS was just a kind of an experiment. Before that, I was using a CM build without Google Apps using FDroid as unique app repository.

I must say that, while still needs some polishing, Sailfish OS (which is not 100% free, but is quite there, and provides a complete Linux experience), does the job. My Pebble works, my BT car kit works, and I have all apps I need. In fact, my biggest complain is about the hardware, being underpowered and with an atrocious camera. An official port from Jolla to some mid level device would make me _very_ happy.

In some countries, like mine, the FOSS mobile OS killer has a name: WhatsApp. Without official support for FFOS or Ubuntu Touch, and being very aggressive against third party apps (banning their users), most people can't even think of them as an option for daily usage.

Jolla goes around this bundling a commercial Android Dalvik emulator. Not the best solution, but one quite pragmatic.

I have a Jolla too, and while I love it as an N9 successor, I'd lie if I didn't say I'm disappointed they didn't opensource the whole system. This failed to attract a critical mass of developers and has made the platform quite stagnant. I understand their investors were afraid of opensourcing key assets, but their alternative plan hasn't worked well either.

Does it make sense to go the N900 route now? Anyone has any experience on this? Some worthy successors like Pyra and Neo900 are coming out, and N900 can be still found easily to use while waiting for these newcomers. How good is Maemo these days?

An obvious alternative is to get a Nexus and install CopperheadOS + FDroid. The ecosystem is very polished and lively, plus hardware is very good albeit with planned obsolescence due to the lack of long-term kernel updates.

What do you notice about the 'complete Linux experience'? I cannot find too much on the Sailfish OS homepage; going to Mer shows it's a minimal Linux with QT on top. For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that? I would buy a phone/tablet device that runs Ubuntu (or Debian) smoothly (all hardware supported) in a heartbeat but seems nothing is there yet so I currently have to go for the Pyra which has all that and a keyboard and replaceable batteries.

Also; the Mer wiki mentions an Android compatibility layer and you manage an Android emulator; would either or both not solve the Whatsapp issue?

> For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that?

Pretty much yes. With developer mode on you gain access to a terminal with bash and other expected utils. There is a mobile terminal application with custom keyboard which is more or less usable, you can also ssh into the phone without any problem. As for the package manager there is pkcon (probably some alternatives are also available), you can install build utils without any problem.

I've been using Jolla for some time before moving to iOS. It was a very cool experience. I really liked having a phone that I could hack and mess around with. The gesture based UI was nice, it was amazingly comfortable after getting used to it. The main drawback was the lack of apps and the reliability of the phone. The Android apps work poorly, they are sluggish and plenty of apps are not going to work due to lack of Google Play Services. Also with Android apps you get the old flawed Android permission model. The phone crashes from time to time, sometimes in the least suitable moment (stability varies between updates).

I found Jolla comparatively very stable and the Android support was good enough for my purposes, given that it makes little sense to buy a Jolla phone for the sole purpose of running Android apps. People judge Jolla harshly for things they will forgive Android for. "has unfortunately stopped" is disturbingly common in the Android world, coming from Jolla, even before we get into the horrible quality of the vast majority of apps on the Google Play Store. Clearly if your #1 priority is apps from Google Play Store, you should buy an Android phone. But if you want anything different, or if you want an actual Linux phone.... my only objection with Jolla is that they seem starved for resources to regularly release hardware and to target markets like North America at all. So no matter how great a job they do, almost nobody sees their work.

Just to clarify: I was not speaking about application stability, I spoke about the whole OS. I've never seen native Jolla apps crash, the Android apps also seem to be rather stable when they work. However the whole phone can die - the screen goes balck and the status LED starts to blink red - in the middle of usage or just when it seats in the pocket. The phone will restart in a half of a minute or so, but it's a rather infuriatingly when it does so when you try to answer a call.

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