As the release of a new Jolla phone will bring a lot of new users for Sailfish OS, I wanted to make a thread for the old timers and why not newcomers to share their favorite hacks and tweaks however you’ve altered the usability of your personal phone.
As a long time Android user, the control and freedom that the root shell gives feels fresh and exciting. There’s a chance that this line might not age very well but we’ll find that out after the next update.
As many of the community projects and patches have been chilling for the past years and some may be deprecated for a longer period of time, this might be an overwhelming jungle to parse as a new Jolla phone user. As updates and new forks will surely rise after the community gets their new phones, there most likely is a gap between the time a proper patch or update will land for your needed application.
As a new SFOS user, there were a few cases that popped out when I was setting up my phone, minor annoyances and just plain applications that did not work. Instead of PRs and waiting for the upstream fixes, I took the route I’m familiar with and started poking around and in the end I’ve already gathered a bunch of scripts n tweaks that I’ve used to improve the experience on SFOS. Some of the fixes have been found from the forums, some I’ve made myself. Next I want to see what the other more experienced users are doing.
Good initiative to make a listing with handy tweaks, keep on adding them!
Regarding your tweaks for OKBoard, and Clock size:
There is a patch released on 22th of August for OKBoard in OpenRepos, that makes it work on current SFOS 5.2.0.17 release.
As for the clock font size, I have been using the “Larger clock font on homescreen” from Patchmanager:
(The patch doesn’t explicitly lists 5.2.0.17 as compatible version, but works anyway)
It’s more of a clean (hidden) feature than a dirty hack, but there’s a patchmanager patch called ‘tracker path settings’, which let(s) you easily modify the folders that Sailfish automatically indexes. Very useful if you want to add some other folders beyond the defaults, or if you want to remove folders from ever being indexed. However, it currently isn’t working, and I suppose it is because it tries to apply the patch to ‘tracker’, but the software is now called ‘localsearch’. Maybe @nephros could take a look?
Recent SFOS versions updated the “tracker” package (now called “localsearch”), and that very likely works differently from the configurations made by the patch.
AFAICS, DBus calls can be used to configure the locations - Upstream documentation is here:
[EDIT:] The patch also seems to hardcode /home/nemo as home dir which will be wrong more often than not.
Yes. Good that you mention.
I read it already here in the forum somewhere.
I did not check release notes but would expect such things to be noted there?
If you are referring to tracker vs localsearch, I would not expect that to be mentioned in the Release Notes, but the ChangeLog usually lists things like this.
Yes.
And you are right.
The change from tracker to localsearch was/is well hidden in this link/upload (linked from within release notes thread.
I thought these kind of changes are more worth to report in release notes than e.g.
Summary
Several build and development tools received major updates
