I do somewhat agree with this in that there is a certain distance between the company and the community. While there are company people around, in terms of communication, strategy, plans and even ultimate vision for Sailfish, the company is less than transparent. Being more transparent would create a warmer feel in the community.
However, when you’re a small company struggling for survival, it is very easy to become a little unfocused on the community. Especially if that community becomes a forum for complaints and whining (which is not uncommon — we are on the Internet after all). Your attention stretches only to the immediate things that can keep you afloat. Been there done that.
To really be able to make the community a multiplier you need two things:
A strong USP (as mentioned in another thread). Something the OS does uniquely different or uniquely well that the users rave about, and which the company raves about (think early days of Tesla or iPhone). That way the other quirks are forgiven.
Strong leadership that can convey energy, a vision, and create a following.
That’s what I wanted to express, but you put it 1000 times better than I could!
And regarding your last point, I agree. It’s not very easy to see who’s behind Jolla now. If you go to their YouTube page, the last video is from two or three years ago. It’s hard to create that following if you don’t know who exactly to follow. Some might argue that the product will speak for itself, but sadly in the real world good marketing helps quite a lot. As you say, they are not very transparent about their vision or their long-term plans, which is not great when it’s such a small community (small compared to Android, haha)
How? By just pointing out the truth?
This should not be the case and must not happen at all in an open forum, imo!
And I am sure it does also not help to keep silent about the well-known shortcomings…
I have followed the last days a lot of @Steve_Everett 's posts and do see them all as valid and with well formed wording. And no negativity.
Nevertheless I agree there have been lots of whining and demanding as well a lot of times.
For whatever reasons? I am not going to join that discussion…
As a side note:
I started to use SFOS as daily driver only around summer/fall 2018 (before using N9/x0 and Jolla1/C only as hobby) with XA2 with updated Android support.
Just to find end of 2019 that some unacceptable bug(s) hindered me to update to 3.3, then again to 3.4 and now again with 4.0. So my daily driver is still on 3.2.
And those bugs were partly resolved only, and new (imho some unacceptable) introduced. Again I do not want to start/join that discussion…
I see i was too vague even in the clarification. I took it as a bit of an implicit question of whether @Steve_Everett was complicit, and all i meat to say was “not really, but we can all improve”.
But it also doesn’t help to repeat them time and time again without adding anything to the conversation.
(Not saying anyone here did that, talking about the generic case)
Good, then we agree.
I’d like to talk to you about the narrative that recent releases are somehow effective unusable… because i don’t see basically any other people saying that, and i certainly don’t experience it. And actually this serves a a bit of an example - not citing any sources for that claim. After all, a bit more attention on said issues can’t hurt? But i’ll not press, let me know when you are ready if you want to talk (probably not in this thread).
I am hoping you’ve got your words wrong here, but just to be clear, it is not up to you or anybody else to sit in judgement of me and whether my posts are complicit, to your personal satisfaction, or whatever. You may disagree with my point of view - that’s your prerogative and I fully respect that, but this is an open forum and all points of view should be encouraged and welcomed - and if they repeat a view or a shortcoming that has been stated before, perhaps many times, then perhaps more weight should be attached to fixing it. Enough said.
I did not keep track of all those issues (maybe I should have ).
But just to state two or three (in my eyes unacceptable issues for a daily driver for at least 3 months!) please see below.
I agree not all of them are blockers to use but absolutely hindering/derailing daily experience!
Some may be system-file-edited away.
Some may not affect all but a good portion of people (would I risk to be one of them?).
And I did/do not want to derail the good intention of this thread so please open up another one (which I was just to lazy and mayne disappointed) to do so) in case you feel to the need to discuss below issues (and more if you need to be pointed at):
(yes, I know, last one is evil. but hey it is pandemic)
oh, and this
and maybe such
or maybe this here (adding one-by-one as stumbling upon them on daily basis without looking for them…)
Well David, you are the Jolla an employee, why don’t you bring that topic up Jolla-internally?
As it became obvious, it is quite relevant for FSO users to be able to distinguish Jolla employees from community people, in order to prevent perceptions as “Jolla employees are lurking in this forum and disguising themselves as community members”.
IMO these negative perceptions are a logical consequence of Jolla employees not being detectable as such, here at FSO (in contrast to TJC).
Side note: “It’s quite possible. Stay sharp ” is not an appropriate reaction to somebody pointing out this issue, from my (community) POV.
I understood Steve’s use of “lurking” to be lighthearted rather than negative, and my response was intended as lighthearted as well. If I offended you, Steve or anyone else with my comment, then I apologise. In particular, I should make clear that I don’t believe there’s any actual lurking going on from Jolla employees.
I have brought up the issue internally though. Let’s see what happens.
I think the point here, for me at least, is that I had a perception that Jolla didn’t really have any presence on this community - which is as much for their benefit as it is for ours, probably more. My own view is that this is essential if Jolla want good community relations, and to keep the community motivated and excited, and finally so that people don’t get fed up with the lack of engagement and leave. I held that perception because I had never seen any Jolla involvement in the discussions. On the latter point it turns out I was wrong - Jolla folk are involved, its just not obvious they are Jolla people and not normal community users if you don’t know who they are. Hence my comment. However … I don’t for one minute believe that Jolla folk are deliberately disguising their presence on the forum - their ‘disguise’ is borne out of the fact that they are not identified as Jolla employees and, to those that don’t know them, look like any other forum member who lurks on here for in silence for the majority of time but contributes when he or she comes across a topic they want to make a point about. Your point about David (flypig’s real name I assume) being able to promote this issue internally is well made - especially as they had Jolla ‘badges’ on the old TJC forum and decided, for whatever reason, not to carry some method of identifying Jolla employees forward to the new forum. On David’s response to me, I think this is fine - he has correctly gauged my sense of humour and responded in kind.
Actually a few well-known several sailors/employees, are already present, occasionally engaging in discussions. Level of visibility or their participation varies according to each of their individual specialty/field, relevant to the topics being discussed at a certain time… Naturally, and reasonably so… they keep some distance from general discussions, and engage in ‘more’ serious/critical matters, especially ‘urging bugs’ and developers’ technical obstacles.
I agree!
It is a huge effort - in my personal words I would say an impracticably monster project - to write a usermanual for SFOS, that covers anything and any problem that may occur.
I see this in a way - Sailfish lives in the community and from the community. And here in the Sailfish community we solve problems by communicating with each other. For me, the user manual of Sailfish OS is this forum. And I like this!
One thing that I think could improve cohesion is more transparency and feedback on the bugs raised via this forum. I know I go on about it at every available opportunity but how is it that something like [3.4.0.22] XA2 phone calls no audio can be generating so many complaints from paid up sailors and not getting tracked as a known issue in release notes? (even worse, it was tracked previously and marked as fixed) I think there should be some clearer visibility of which bugs Jolla is going to work on especially for things which render supported devices useless/extremely disruptive. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this @flypig.
I’m afraid I can’t add anything useful to the discussion as its not something I’ve been tracking myself. It’s possible @jovirkku may be in a better position to give an update.
Speaking personally, I’m all for improving transparency by tying as many things together (bug reports, pull requests, release notes, etc.), but a balance is needed to avoid taking time away from actually fixing the bugs.
I try to post relevant PRs to their related bug reports (see for example here), but there are reasons why this may not happen (e.g. simply not realising that the fix relates to this bug).
As community members, one thing you can do to help, if you want to, is occasionally check the PRs for relevant projects to see whether there are any targetting a bug report you know about.
I feel that this was more happening on TJC than here, probably because those impatient people left the boat since then (or maybe it’s because I don’t follow this forum as much as during the initial TJC years)
I do want to join that discussion , because that’s why personally I have kind of the same feeling than @diegoc. The 4.0 indeed brought a few regressions on (I think) some core features of a smartphone:
Just about the Bluetooth issue, the thing is that it was reported during the Early Access, but the 4.0 was released anyway without any comment from a Sailor. I understand they can’t spend all their day on this forum, but the release threads are generally important to discover major issues.
After hitting those issues myself and digging here, I actually discovered that they might not be related specifically to the 4.0, as the bug reports I’ve linked above are for the 3.4. So probably, those bugs are not easily reproducible and hit only a few of us? <- this is where I would love to see Sailors proactively jumping in:
I would like to have proper statements for such issues:
Hey, we’ve seen that a few of you have this/that major issue but we can’t reproduce consistently on Sailfish X. We advise you to reflash
Hey, this is indeed a major regression and we have a fix but it’s too costly to release a patch for it, bear with us until 4.1!
I can’t imagine that Jolla’s clients can accept a broken Bluetooth or call recording, so currently I’m left wondering if I’m one of the few unlucky that need to reflash or if 4.1 will improve things, and in the meantime, I need to run scripts to restart things when I need them. If I need to reflash no problem, I’ll be sad to still not be able to recommend Sailfish but that’s it!
Personally that’s this uncertainty that makes me feel a bit forgotten.
There was probably a generation change, there are many new names to be read here in the forum. Personally, I know 3 users who left SFOS and they weren’t impatient, but annoyed. For me, SFOS is just an interesting playground and no longer a daily driver, but hope dies last After all, it is the last European operating system for a phone
Before I fully turn to Jolla, I would like to see 2 things: 1. a feature freeze and 2. a bug sprint that is accompanied by the community and eliminates the most annoying bugs. The new users may not understand this, but the long-term users do.
Which is extremely subjective. For me, the fact that I haven’t been able to take screenshots on the tablet for three years (and counting) is the most annoying bug I’ve ever experienced with Sailfish, for others it would be synchronisation issues with CalDAV, others would be annoyed by the browser crashing randomly, etc.
I left in 2017 went my Jolla phone died. I had never been happy with the build quality. But the community ports are ok. No to see if one can get the bugs out.
).
” is not an appropriate reaction to somebody pointing out this issue, from my (community) POV.
, because that’s why personally I have kind of the same feeling than 
After all, it is the last European operating system for a phone 