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Comment by dbeley | Hacker News Reader

> But it's really exciting to be able to `ls` and `cd` and `ssh` on a phone, and know that the software updates are coming.

It's strange that SailfishOS has not caught more marketshare on the hacker/tech enthusiast community, because it's (almost) everything people wants about Purism : you lose a bit in the free software and open hardware side, but you win in terms of price (used phone + 50$ license), availability and usability (Right now, it's the only alternative to Android and iOS I can safely recommend).

If only Jolla devs had kept their promises of open-sourcing more of their code.

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> If only Jolla devs had kept their promises of open-sourcing more of their code.

I think that's a big part of the answer to why it hasn't caught among techies. When I tried using it (shortly after release), there were numerous issues in their default apps that nobody could fix because they are proprietary and Jolla didn't seem to have the resources to handle all the bugs.

I'd wager that if it had been open source, the early adopters would have put some time in to fix a lot of the bugs.

In retrospect I'm pretty pissed at them for not being honest and upholding their promises. In my book they're basically con artists that just tried to get the Linux community's money by saying "open source" without actually meaning it.

This, along with Jolla's bankruptcy, is why I stopped using Sailfish as a former user. I didn't feel that I could depend on the platform sticking around.

I later switched to Ubuntu Touch because, despite Canonical picking up the project, the community had continued maintaining it. They could do that because it was freely licensed; nobody could do that for Sailfish.

What hardware are you running it on?

A OnePlus One, though I have both a PinePhone and Librem 5 preordered, and I'm looking forward to giving both of those a try. The OPO is nice, though I've had issues with the battery life.

I use a Sailfish phone, and Meego before that. I suppose a lot of geeks are exactly the sort of people that actually want to use all possible functionality of and software for their phone, "power users", and are most handicapped by an ideological device. Most of the Jolla and Nokia N9 users I know are not technical geeks but rather want to support a cause.

is it strange? when I read their website it seems like they're targeted at corporations. It takes a lot of scrolling to find 'Sailfish OS X' that I can install on one of 3 phones from a company that I never considered a solid phone manufacturer.

It was different five years ago, read GP in that light.

ah, ok. that explains a lot, because that's not the first time I've heard his sentiment but didn't get what people were talking about.

You seem to be forgetting LineageOS

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