Hacker News Reader

Comment by maheart | Hacker News Reader

SailfishOS is officially supported on a number of different Sony mobiles (e.g. X, XA2 range, 10 and 10 II ranges). All these devices continue to receive updates.

SailfishOS is not completely FLOSS, but it's real Linux, and it's polished enough to be a daily driver (I've been using it for 7 years).

View on HN

I daily drove an N9 when it was current hardware, and it was reasonably good. Harmattan was buggy as hell, but it held promise.

However, I found it extremely disappointing that they didn't cater to the FOSS community by making it easy to reproduce and iterate on the OS. If Nokia with the N9 took an approach to the OS and community akin to what Pine64 has been doing with the Pinephone, we would be in a very different place today with Linux phones.

Pine64 doesn't do any software, so the comparison is apples to oranges :-)

The software from the N9 became what today is SailfishOS (mostly FOSS, but UI closed), and for something fully FOSS, Nemo is also derived from Harmattan, https://nemomobile.net/

> Pine64 doesn't do any software, so the comparison is apples to oranges :-)

True, but Pine64 facilitates the FOSS community in spades when it comes to shipping a hardware profile with mainline support, and ensuring it's trivial for Pinephone users to run alternative operating systems down to the boot loader.

I'm a developer and the N9 was completely opaque, it would have required spending significant time just to even begin figuring out how to replace the OS.

I'm now into my third year with Sailfish as my daily driver (Sony Xperia XA2 Plus) and can confirm it's first rate. And if you need an app that doesn't have a native Sailfish version, it'll almost certainly run the Android equivalent.

Wow it looks great, I had no idea it existed in a usable state. I though it was just the bones of Meego, I used Moblin on an N800, it was great sat the tine, it looks like a truly functional experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com