It'd be lovely if all these efforts crystallized into a truly open Linux-based mobile platform available to the masses, even as a niche thing.
Sailfish is far from open yet, but it's a very good OS.
Nokia produced incredibly good hardware, with the added benefit of a physical keyboard in case of the N900. This is a must. They seem to be getting back to business. It'd make a lot of sense for them to buy Jolla and rebuild Maemo, which should have never been discontinued!
Nokia's N770-N9 Maemo/Meego saga was profitable despite being a side-project and having little to no marketing.
It's the best mobile platform I've ever tried. After all, it was just a tweaked Debian distro.
It's exciting to see Purism might head the pure Linux stack way, not just a de-Googled Android route. I also wish Jolla eventually open sources Sailfish, or gets bought by someone who does this.
I've got a Jolla phone running Sailfish, which is reasonably open. I'm happy with it because as an advanced user I can enable developer mode and modify or fix things. It's a stable and usable system. But Jolla doesn't seem to be doing so well right now. Before that I had a Nokia N9, the only Maemo phone, precurser to Sailfish. Another capable although minimal system. That didn't go anywhere either, because Nokia sold out to Microsoft – who by the way don't seem to be doing so well either in the mobile space.
Also Firefox seems to have thrown the towel in the ring already.
I'm waiting to see what Ubuntu comes up with in the phone/tablet space. It's certainly taking a long time.
I don't understand that with all the people concerned about rights and privacy, and all the open-source affectionados, there just doesn't seem to be that much of a market for alternatives to the big two of Android and Apple iOS.
Is it because of locked-down hardware? Or that Linux on desktop and mobile is not a (funding) priority? Or are people that addicted to downloading low-quality apps (i.e. the "eco-system")? Or is there simply not enough demand?
Lucky us, now we have Jolla and Sailfish OS (: there are also platforms like mer - nemomobile - maemo - tizen... but the average user likes iPhone/iOS and Android, that is marketing of course...
Personally, I'd go with Jolla and Sailfish, as now I have N900 with maemo, and I feel the freedom, even after 5 years, it is still the one of the best phones. Communities are what we need, not capitalism.
I really really hope that Jolla takes off. It sounds like for a far too brief while, Maemo was the hacker's dream OS, which is pretty dang cool. It also sounds like the Nokia N9 was the first phone in which the beauty and usability of the device matched its hacker friendliness. That's all I'm waiting on. The thing I don't want to see in mobile is what happened to Linux, where yeah it's great that we have this open OS, but the experience itself is scattershot, questionable, or very very poor. If Jolla can do this -- and since some of the main people that worked on N9 are players here, they might have a shot -- then that's when I'll be paying close attention.
Just curious, but if you enjoy a Nokia N900, would you not consider the Cosmo Communicator or the Fxtec a good follow-up? It has modern hardware, still a good hardware keyboard. Together with the more updated Sailfish OS you get something much newer and faster.
I can imagine criticism about Jolla not having everything open sourced, but what I remember it was the same situation with Nokia for the N900 and N9. Also, in some respects the UI of Sailfish is somewhat different from Maemo/Meego, not everybody will like that.
And yet I am using a Linux Phone since 2014 as a daily driver :) And no, it is not for everyone, just like the Linux desktop. It would need a company like Nokia to put its weight behind it to bring it that far.
But if a smaller company like Jolla can do it, it can be sustainable. If there are users and enough money coming in, all it needs to do is exist. And maybe some day there will be a company like Nokia putting its weight behind it and it can gain marketshare in big numbers. But even without it, it is a viable platform, just with some drawbacks.
So yes, for the near future I keep on using my Sony Xperia with Sailfish OS. I also keep an eye on the Pinephone and Librem 5, but today they are not ready to be a daily driver for me.
The real Linux aspect is definitely something that many developers find appealing. I still meet a lot of hackers who couldn't think of using anything else than the ageing Nokia N900. Hardware keyboard, Debian packaging, root out of the box, ...
Of all the new entrants with new mobile OSs, Jolla has the most experienced crew. They also chose Qt as an app runtime, so they do not rely on Web apps to become mature and efficient on mobile hardware.
Since it does not rely on anything heavy-weight, the Sailfish OS should scale down to budget smartphone hardware at least as well as Android.
The also have a lot of drive to prove Nokia wrong, much the same way Andy Rubin was driven to succeed after Danger failed to make headway with OEMs and carriers. There is a lot to be said for the power of smart pissed-off people.
I have been using Saifish as my daily driver and only phone since 2014. I bought a Nokia N9 secondhand in 2013, but the battery was not great anymore and I could not use Whatsapp on it. The choice for Sailfish was then easy. For 5 years I used the Jolla 1, which has received updates from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 I am on a Sony XA2. I bought it secondhand and after a commercial license for Android app support it still felt very affordable to me. I you would want to start now, the Sony Xperia 10II might be the best choice with Oled screen and Aarch64 support.
Sailfish is being made by a small company with not that many developers, which means there are rough edges compared to Apple and Google. They can spend many millions on their software. I am very happy with Sailfish updates though and also very happy with using it.
The only Android apps I use are Firefox in its last v68 incarnation, and also Whatsapp. I'm lucky not to be tied in too much with all kinds of services :) For many services there are native apps.
And yes, it is not fully open source, which is a pity. The current investor sees no business opportunity in that, but to be real, without that investor, Jolla and Sailfish would not exist anymore. They are mostly a B2B company now, B2C has commercially failed around 2015. I do hear sometimes that more people are using Sailfish, but I haven't seen real statistics. There is also the Nemo project, which started with reimplementing the closed bits in Sailfish, and later deviated somewhat. If Sailfish gets more succesful, that is always still an option to force their hand, but I do feel the time is not right. I do have to say that the Linux community can be very critical towards its own community, sometimes getting to be toxic.
I would be open for a Pinephone, but it is mostly regarded as a developer phone right now. I will wait for Pinephone2 and hope things improve to make it more a daily driver. The Librem 5 is priced out of my league, though I do admire what they are doing.
Sailfish is based on Meego, which was a merge of Maemo and another project. It was the OS that backed the N9, the last phone Nokia made before they went to MS.
Nokia could do worse than to spin-in Jolla. There must be enough handset engineers at Jolla and just sloshing around Helsinki that Nokia could spin up a world-class handset operation tout suite. A choice of Sailfish or Android would be very nice, especially Sailfish in the form of a Linux tablet.
I need to get my hands on one of these. I used the Maemo OS on the N900 for a couple of years and must say I loved it(having a hardware keyboard was a plus) I've got to say I love the community around it. Just about 40000users left on that particular system yet some of the best support I've ever seen. The community is incredible.
If this OS, and phone, can get that same sort of support and community around it(and I don't see why not seeing that they're based on the same cores built by the same teams) I see great things in the future. Like booting Ubuntu, Jolla and Mozilla from the same phone.
For the record Maemo spawned among other things Sailfish OS (running on my dakly smartphone) and many current mobile Linux distro projects can trace their lineage to Maemo on the Nokia N-series.
Same with Jolla – my first gen is breaking and I can't buy a replacement running Sailfish at this moment. I like Sailfish and I'm interested in Ubuntu Phone, but clearly they seem to have some issues convincing manufacturers to release some hardware with these alternative systems. I hope maybe Fairphone and Puzzlephone could become open mobile hardware devices with at least semi-official support for multiple open operating systems because I'm not quite brave enough to start hacking mobile devices to run Linux.
Sailfish is far from open yet, but it's a very good OS.
Nokia produced incredibly good hardware, with the added benefit of a physical keyboard in case of the N900. This is a must. They seem to be getting back to business. It'd make a lot of sense for them to buy Jolla and rebuild Maemo, which should have never been discontinued!
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