I like the look of SFOS a lot, but the biggest hangup I have to making the transition is the gesture controls. I disable these on every device I use, because they absolutely suck to operate with dyspraxia. Conversely to expectation, having buttons rather than vague gesture controls is far, far preferable in regular operation, mostly because unintentional operation is constant and very, very annoying. I go as far as disabling multiple panels on the home screen.
I’m told there’s no real launcher ecosystem for Sailfish, so I’m now considering writing my own. Before I do so, are there any other possibilities? What I have now on Android is perfect:
SFOS is a swipe/gesture based os, there really isn’t an option to replace basic swipes with buttons, if whatever medical condition you have makes swipes problematic it probably just isn’t an os for you, sorry
There are some patches that could help you like the ones showing the first row of apps always and you could use the ticks indicating you are on subpage to navigate, but I don’t know how you could replace the edge swipes easily.
Maybe there is a chance that some of the existing patches (or new patches by you or someone else) could ease your life with edge swipes of SFOS, but I doubt you can get totally rid of gestures, unless you go the route of creating bunch of overlay buttons bound to the swipe actions scattered at suitable places all over the screen.
I think in general this should be possible - pretty much all of the visual stuff is written in qml and you can overwrite that using patches. Though that would be a rather large task, making SFOS button based won’t be easy. Well, but maybe once the Commodore phone image is available it should be a little easier - I imagine there won’t be as much swiping on a phone with physical keyboard.
But you would still need to emulate the button presses somehow on the phone without the keypad. Either heavy editing the QML-files like you suggested, or overlays like I suggested. Or combination of both.
Honestly, my thoughts are largely “create an application drawer”, which would probably be some sort of frame in whatever panel appears when one swipes up from teh bottom of the display. The actual swipe action would be inhibited, and instead a simple menu button would trigger the same action. Inhibiting left/right swipes would fix the rest, and I don’t mind the pull-down action (mostly because this is something I do two-handed and have more control over). The only real caveat is emulating the navigation bar. I really miss capacitive buttons.
Any other necessary functionality could be then bound in menus or applets, although I have yet to toy around with SFOS to that extent. I need to get a VM on the go for that.
Maybe it would be pe possible to emulate some swipes using the volume buttons? For example add a top menu button to disable volume control and enable dwipe control via the volume keys? Volume up is a left, volume down a right swipe. Pressing both buttons is a down swipe?
There’s an app that functions like a simple keyboard based launcher.
With just a little fiddling it could be made to start on boot.
But completely without gestures - I don’t think that’s an option with SfOS
