@Jolla & Sailfish community please think about a compatibility layer for standard linux apps written for Debian/Ubuntu or Suse (or whatever), in a similar way as the Android App Support does for Android apps.
This would solve a lot of problems users have with the lack of apps and would open SFOS for the large amount of apps available on Linux distros.
Letās see from another point of view.
Can we install apps without a GUI like debauchee barrier?
Answer is YES, as far as we can replace some libraries or recompile it with dedicated libraries to avoid conflicts.
A similar topic was touched in past:
There are more and more desktop app from Gnome and KDE which are now compatible with small screens. It would be indeed nice to see them on Sailfish OS. But I think a lot of work need to be done to add this layer on SFOS.
Gimp / Libre Office / Seamonkey / Geany maybe? These were running on my old nokia n900 12+ years ago. Using chroot and debian graphic enviroment. I could also show a window from my desktop to the n900 via setenv DISPLAY and xhost (both had X server I thinkā¦).
Without keyboard maybe it will be hard to use apps not designed for mobile devices, but on the other hand, give to the people the choice and power! Someone could use a bluetooth keyboard / mouse too!
Before you wish that for yourself, you should try Libertine on Ubuntu Touch first. IMHO, it sucks hard, especially on phones. But otherwise youād still have the kernel version problem and the drivers problem. So anything except non-accelerated CentOS-clones wonāt run properly some Sailfish HW. The Xperia 10 III has kernel v4.19, the current one is 6.2. Debian bookworm has Kernel 6.1. Browsers suck hard in Libertine on not-so-old phones due to the same problem.
No, you can can have different versions side-by-side. The old wl-shell version will be a problem for some applications and will become worse over the years. All other shells are missing anyway.
Would an app like Gnumeric work thank to harbour-containers? (maybe with a small bt keyboard)
So I could make my bills in he train like I did on my N900?
Running desktop apps is where making the X10iii external monitor work comes in.
I canāt usefully do much work on a phone screen, but if I could plug a large monitor into the phone, it is certainly more than capable of a lot of what my linux desktop does.
On the N900, it was a pretty useful desktop computer with VNC for writing documents and email. More graphical things and VNC became a bit painful - perhaps it would be a lot better now, but I would really prefer just to have a monitor plug in directly.
My N900 was also formatted as a Suse bootdisk i.e. you could plug it into a PC, and it would usb-boot into a full desktop Linux. This was amusing when I had it plugged into a aircraft entertainment usb for charging, and when they rebooted the entertainment system half way through the flight (quite a common occurence), my seat-back display rebooted into Linux. Oops.
I didnāt know such things existed! I know ed is the standard text editor (!).
And no, fucking Chrome should be supported in getting to rule the world and turn whatās left of the free WWW into a Google-defined proprietary protocol.
If anything, dev efforts should be put into enhancing Mozilla so we have at least one competing implementation as long as possible.