No thanks, I'd rather use a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS

Image transcription:

buy privacy-first community driven phone
look inside
closed source OS with no recovery image and outdated dependencies

I wish there was an up to date linux phone/tablet alternative. We are kind of lucky that there is still a google alternative. The closer google gets, the worse our choices get. And with the dev speed of google and apple, it is really hard to keep up with them. Even many basics are still missing on linux or a free android.

isn't sailfish open source since 2016?

The Fairphone can run Linux, can't it?

I mean it can… but it's not exactly in the same universe as a somewhat polished user experience

Is /e/OS out of date?

SailfishOS's underlying system and applications are open source.
Jolla has a proprietary UI and android compatibility layer they run on top of it.
The UI can be replaced with open source community ones.
Its similar to Android in its open source nature.

But not everything works. One user is regularly posting updates (I think in !linuxphones@lemmy.ca) about getting all devices of their FP to work. They are making progress but it's still tedious work and if they ever lose interest or something happens to them it can be years until someone capable can pick up the torch.

oh right, it's the compat thing.

Don't know how it is with this phone but they usually use an Android kernel which means you are beholden to the hardware supplier for device drivers. That generally means that you are stuck with a horribly outdated kernel.

Out of date is subjective.

It's not only the OS itself but the ecosystem. There is no free RCS app on android.

There is no "state of the art" (or even close to it) app for free Banking, Crypto, translation, tax reporting (Germany), car navigation, social hiking/biking/sports, not even public broadcasting, free news apps are lacking features, ...

I donate to many apps but it's not enough. There are amazing people and apps and ecosystems out there but it's hard to keep up.

i really hope fairphone themselves picks it up. it would be incredible if fp7 (or 8, give them time) could be 100% (or close) compatible with linux out of the box. even if it required closed source blobs for like the radios or whatever. they can still ship with the option of regular android to not scare off the normies

i put postmarket on my fp5 and it runs pretty damn well. with a little more polish it absolutly could be my daily driver. it is very close.

i know its a lot to hope for, but i think faiphone is in a unique position to do this if they ever decided to.

Uh even this short stab is quite wrong. Here notes from Jolla itself for Sailfish OS 5.2

• As promised, users can unlock the Jolla Phone bootloader. A corresponding menu item can now be found at the System Settings / Developer tools
• Users can do factory reset from the System Settings
• Users can enter the recovery mode with the volume up key + power key combination
• Flashable images and fastboot will be provided (coming soon)
• The initial version of the Privacy Switch was implemented. The function is end user configurable and to start with, the users can control e.g. Bluetooth, WLAN, Location and AppSupport status with the switch. Further implementations are coming and the framework is available for community contributions.

The base of Sailfish OS is a full blown Linux, way more open than Android (more options for the user, less secure than Graphene, which has that as main goal) you can easily install/compile Linux software on it.

Close source components are used. Parts of the UI (Jolla is open sourcing more and more), libhybris to run closed source Android drivers, Android App Support.

So yes its not as open source as debian, but offers more freedom to modify the OS than Graphene and gives you near full control.

Android compatibility layer is called App Support and is a licensed version of AlienDalvik. It's only available on officially supported phones (Jolla's own and some Sony Experia).

I love PMOS, but isn't it AOSP under the hood?

Mine just updated today. Its been working out for me and my family for 6ish months now. Cant complain.

According to Distrowatch and Wikipedia it is based on Alpine Linux.

No but it is as Linux as Google Android.

So basically no need to outrage?

Also not got mine yet in batch 1.

Me too. The mobile space is stuck between two dogshit OSes. Gnome is doing good work in this space which is nice to see.

Blatant ragebait

Man, I just want a pocketable device with Linux on it, with cell Bluetooth wifi gps antennas that can send and receive texts, calls and data. I don't care about individual apps. If services can be reached via a browser, I'm good.

Its pretty abysmal in the way of hardware security, and software. The gOS team did a deep dive on alternative devices to the pixel. Only device even close to the pixel was Samsung, but well... Samsung hates their consumers it seems and refuses to open their devices.

i dont think so... you need waydroid to run android apps. i think its proper linux...

It may be a private phone, but you don't really know whats going on under those proprietary blobs.

Sailfish OS is the definition of proprietary software.
You need to buy a subscription if you even want to install it on third party devices.

It's like Windows but it claims to be private and commnunity driven while not providing the source code to the entire OS. It's a little misleading to me

I'm in batch 2, so I guess I'll be waiting for a while still.

KDE is doing some impressive work lately too

So I tried sailfish os on a volla s23 or 22 I don't remember the name. and I was kind of underwhelmed by it. I didn't spend much time there, the community port didn't support the proprietary software I would of had to use waydroid which I felt like defeated the point. So I am not sure I gave it enough time or a proper chance.

To me sailfish os felt much more like a solid phone experience, but with Ubuntu touch felt much more framiliar, and felt more versatile because of that. Though the experience with Ubuntu touch felt much more like a computer with a horrible gnome interface that is not intuitive, and you never get used to it.

I hear people say a lot of good things about sailfish and I wish I knew what I was looking for, because I was underwhealmed and I really really want a solid Linux phone. Graphene os is cool but in the long run I feel its best to remove ourselves from android, and also a Linux phone is already the perfect cyberdeck so its just cool.

I keep hoping if I say it enough I can will it into existence but I really think that thr steam frame is going to usher in a community made phone/tablet that runs on arch and uses fex just like the steam frame does.

So many community projects poped up on github when the steam deck was released, and people been using proton in third party apps. Hell other distros have their own "steam deck" mode that just boots into big picture mode. I truely think that fex, and the work valve is putting into(or funding) arm64, is going to be more valuable than the steam frame itself. Gamehub app is already using the work valve put in with fex, and arm translation layers you can play red dead on a modern mid range pocco phone at 720p fps. And that's the exe PC version not the Netflix apk.

Ubuntu touch has a widr selection of devices that are 90% completed and at the bareminimum do what you want.

You don't even need a shitty slow phone. Some of the oneplus phones work and they run on a snapdragon 845-865 which are the golden standard when it comes to emulation and other harder processes. I think the 845's source code got leaked too so often projects will only work for that chip.

Also good nees :)

I've been keeping an eye on the Commodore Callback . Looks pretty good. I would just need Android Auto with CoMaps to work and I'll buy it.

another batch two here. Maybe the longer we wait the more polished the OS will be, so maybe worth the wait. Especially waiting for camera app/driver update. The front cam seems really fucked right now.

Good to know! I haven't been able to try one yet, so I wasn't sure.

My understanding is that pmos is the exception in that it runs "pure" linux, whereas Ubuntu touch and Sailfish OS run Helium as a compatibility layer that allows them to use Android drivers

It may be a private phone, but you don’t really know whats going on under those proprietary blobs.

Yes thats not good, but also a problem of many common Linux distributions. If you have any linux-firmware-* packages installed on your system, they also contain similar binary blobs for the firmware. E.g. Intel or Qualcom wireless cards. But you can utilize all tools up to strace under Sailfish OS, to see what those drivers are accessing and check that they don't do anything bad. Under Graphene OS, you can not do this. (But its resonable to trust the very privacy focused developer that they have checked and tested this and isolated them as far as possible on the OS level)

Sailfish OS is the definition of proprietary software. You need to buy a subscription if you even want to install it on third party devices.

Again this is not correct. If what you claim is true, how comes that the OS is available on all these devices?.
Sailfish OS is open Source at its core and easily ported to new devices. What you can do is pay for the licensed content on official devices. That enables automatic updates and proprietary software as the MS Exchange support and the Android App Support. Though for the later you can also install Waydroid because, you know, its Linux! Paying Jolla however gives access to a more comfortable solution and support development of the platform.

It’s like Windows

Um... no. Can you port Windows to a new device? No, its source is closed. Does Microsoft support people hacking their OS? No, Jolla has community meetings for that. Do you have full Access udner Windows? No. Does Sailfish send your data to a third party? No. Does Sailfish show you adds? No, Does it force you to use AI? No and so on and so forth.

Please don't hate on the one European company trying to do things right. Support them in making things better.

No, not at all. Just check the things claimed by @pewpew quickly with a search engine or an AI of your choice (Always check the sources it finds!) and you will see that the overwhleming majority is wrong and the rest is blown way out of proportion. See also my answer to his retort below.

I'm more annoyed that they haven't responded to any of my attempts to contact them since March

Plus ~700€, you can get a used foldable Pixel for that price or brand new Pixel with the option of flashing a more secure and trusted OS then Sailfish.

Why don't they at least try to strike deals with the EU telco companies. This is how many of phones started here.

Still can't get over the closed-source OS part. How do you know its privacy-first if you can't verify it?

dont have a smart phone. get a land line. write letters. if your job requires you have a cellphone. no you dont, get a new job. or live illegally in a handmade cabin in the woods.

better yet, deny your brain oxygen until you are legally brain dead. that way the government cant read your thoughts.

i would say you can thank me later, but if you follow my advice, you likely wont be able to. so, you're welcome.

They also license it to car manufacturers, which is probably why that bit is not open-source. It's a big source of income for them.

I don't trust Google hardware. No graphene

The base of Sailfish OS is a full blown Linux, way more open than Android

Sorry, but no. AOSP and Graphene do not use any proprietary blobs. They are 100% open.

By your own post, SailfishOS uses closed source components.

So does Graphene.

Both ship:
Firmware, the HAL components (which are way more critical in my eyes as they have low level hardware access and could hide anything from the OS)
Example for these are: The Camera Stack, the Audio Stack, under Graphene the Widevine DRM components.

Sailfish can run without these, e.g. on the Pinephone. Graphene OS can't
Graphene additionally comes with an eSIM binary, which is disabled by default
Sailfish comes with proprietary UI components, a choice the company made because of their limited manpower as it allowed them to provide features where currently no open source solution exists or existed at the time of implementation) examples are swipe gestures for the keyboard, MS Exchange support, Android App support.
That not great, but far from a closed source system where everything is closed source. There exist many patches for UI components because they are partly open source.

The OS ist still Linux, that is true. It is even LInux+GNU which Android is not. It is Linux with closed source components, thats true too.

The automotive OS is a different product called Seafarix marketed through a separate partnership.

But you can. Its Linux+GNU with a partially open, partially closed source UI. So you can run tracing utilities and other tools even wireshark!) to check that it values your privacy.
That statement that it is a fully closed OS from the OP is wrong.

Both ship: Firmware, the HAL components (which are way more critical in my eyes as they have low level hardware access and could hide anything from the OS)

Aren't firmware and HAL in hardware/devices in the source tree for graphene? Also the camera stack/etc isn't Google's, it's Graphene's.

The Widevine comment is fair, but Sailfish needs to support DRM, too, so they're in the same boat, there.

If there's even one proprietary BLOB inserted into your open-source OS, you no longer have an open-source OS.
Pity, I really really liked the SailfishOS look&feel when I tried it briefly in 2015ish.

You also need a license to use Redhat Linux

how much is the NSA paying you