Sailfish Community News, 13th November 2025 - xdg-shell

Community News
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Sailfish OS update from Jolla

In this fortnight we have the already usual Community meeting summary, Harbour news and finally Repository roundup authored by @pherjung, @vige and @dcaliste respectively. On last week’s community meeting we had once again extremely valuable discussions. This format of summarizing the meeting in the fortnight newsletter complements it very nicely and makes discussion available for even broader audience! Big thanks to the authors :pray: ! Your news, for you, produced by you.

On Tuesday, we released the Sailfish OS 5.0.0.72 for all devices. The significant fix in the 5.0.0.72 was the recovery boot issue affecting Xperia XA2, Xperia 10, and Jolla C2. This release will be also used for the Jolla C2 Q4/25 production batch as a factory image. :partying_face: :tada:

After the NextCloud, we have been preparing open sourcing of following two components; Sailfish svg2png converter and Accounts components. Former is an utility tool that is used to convert (rasterize) scalable vector graphics (svg) to raster graphics in this case portable network graphics (png). Why converting at the first place? Simply because raster images are faster to load. The tool renders different scale factors creating a folder for each scale factor. This way we have optimal size icons for the target resolutions. When to contribute? For example, when a community port would require properly scaled icon package. NB, all platform icons are converted to pngs with this tool. Later component carries a QML module for accessing accounts and performing single-sign-on with accounts which the user adds via the system settings application. Please enjoy!

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Finally, if you haven’t read yet please go and read the latest update regarding the Next gen Jolla Phone planning progress. Please spread the word with #nextgenjollaphone hashtag. Stay tuned for more :+1: .

Community meeting summary

12 users attended the community meeting on 6th of November. There were 5 Jolla employees and 7 community members :slight_smile:
Last but not least, a member of the AsteroidOS community joined the meeting too!

As usual, the discussions were encouraging and really interesting!

Jolla C2 order backlog - @frankps

As announced on 3rd of November in this thread, a new batch has been launched and confirmed. Manufacturing would take place at the week November 17, 2025, with shipments expected by the end of the month. Stay tuned! Christmas arrives a bit earlier :smiley:

GTK support - @pherjung

The issue is the use of the deprecated wl_shell instead of xdg-shell. This means that the support from Qt and Sailfish’s compositor, Lipstick, is missing some features that would be useful for using other toolkits.

Once xdg-shell would be implemented, it will be possible to support other toolkits, such as GTK. Using something similar to Qt-runner is limited because it is itself limited by the features of wl_shell.

An attempt was made to separate Lipstick into two components: a Sailfish homescreen with a project called sailfish-homescreen and a Sailfish compositor with a project called sailfish-compositor. This task was stopped due to a lack of time and difficulty reaching a production level.
Splitting would improve robustness and performance. One possibility would be to use the widely adopted Wayland compositor, Weston, on Sailfish and create a Wayland client out of the Sailfish homescreen.

The compositor would be responsible for:

  • Window management
  • Shell
  • Gestures
  • AppSupport extension
  • Effects
  • Text input support

Unfortunately, changing the compositor architecture requires a much greater commitment than simply updating the xdg-shell implementation on Jolla’s Qt version. The good news is that Sailfish OS isn’t the only one using lipstick. AsteroidOS, a Mer/Sailfish distribution for smartwatches, would be interested in moving away from lipstick. Currently they cannot use KWin, KDE’s Wayland compositor, as it no longer supports the hybris backend or a few other Qt options.

@dcaliste mentioned the idea of developing a proof of concept to run Weston and a Wayland app on Sailfish. The good news is that a Jolla employee has already started working on this as a hobby project! However, it is not completely working. After the meeting @pasik pointed out another alternative could be to base the sailfish-compositor on wlroots.

Sony Xperia 10 IV/V port status - @ExTechOp

Jolla promises to deliver Sailfish to the Xperia 10 IV/V and is committed to doing their part as long as it is feasible. The project has had several unexpected issues for example, some vendor blobs caused issues such as missing battery indication, a non-working camera, VoLTE not working, and a missing fingerprint sensor.

Some reflection is now taking place as they are thinking about completely different approaches by enabling Sony Xperia 10 IV/V through an “officially supported community port”. That could be the first community port supported by Jolla which would have AppSupport available.

Security patch level updates of the Android runtime - @balta

Jolla explains that AppSupport security patch levels are usually updated with major releases (4.5, 4.6, 5.0, etc.). They are currently working on the AppSupport 13 security patch level update, but AppSupport 11 will no longer receive security patch level updates from AOSP.

AppSupport 11 is currently using the latest patch level. The update process is not as simple as triggering a CI chain. In future, they will consider whether they could update AppSupport security level with hotfix updates.

How shall we deal with trolls in the forum - @Fellfrosch

Jolla has offered to expand the moderation group. If someone is interested to join the moderation team, don’t hesitate to send a private message to @rainemak.

It is important for Jolla to allow open discussion as long as the FAQ is respected. Banning a user isn’t always the best solution, as it’s relatively easy to create a new account. Another solution is to silence the problematic user temporarily.

Unfortunately, nobody at Jolla has the time to tweak Discourse. This means that the current status will continue, with topics automatically closing for a period of time as soon as various pieces of content are flagged.

From now on, problematic users will be suspended more quickly than usual. Of course, a warning will be sent beforehand.

Open PR

@dcaliste announced some new features that he has developed for Jolla Notes. These are currently under review, but you can already test them (aarch64 is here and armv8el here). His pull requests offer to save notes as a file, which can then be later synced with WebDAV or rclone for example.

@nephros provided pull requests to fix some 404 links in the official Sailfish OS documentation.

Harbour news

Camera Buddy

Camera Buddy is tool for downloading photos from external DSLR cameras connected via USB or WiFi. It support various external cameras by using Gphoto library under the hood. You can connect the camera via USB (using OTG dongle) or via WiFi (using PTP/IP protocol). Once the camera is connected, you may select what photos you want to download to the phone, choose target directory and then just wait few moments. There is a separate thread about Camera Buddy in the forum: Camera Buddy - announcement and feedback

FRAX BPM Meter

BPM meter counts the Beats Per Minute from the default audio input device or a selected MP3 file. You can use it for DJing or to verify your guess on a tune from the radio. Press the button and get the current BPM after a few seconds. The version 2.2.1 brings aarch64 build, i.e. support for C2 and other aarch64 devices.

SFOS Forum Viewer

SFOS Forum Viewer, the app for this forum, has reached version 1.14.2. This update brings colours to the application cover. Revision history should now work on PMs, and the like indicators should be fixed in logged out mode.

Repository roundup

Main interface

  • sailfish-weather, the weather application and event view widget, turok proposed his implementation of OpenWeather provider. He left Foreca as the default provider and added a new one based on Open Weather. One need to create an API key to use this new service. Everything is explained in the pull request. The modifications are now discussed with maintainers to polish, improve and hopefully soon being able to accept the changes.

Network, communication and telephony stack

  • mobile-broadband-provider-info, the database of access point configurations, pvuorela worked on minimising the differences accumulated during more than 10 years with the upstream project.

  • pptp, a client for the proprietary Microsoft Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, LaakkonenJussi fixed the location of ip executable, moved now to /usr/sbin/.

Low level libraries

Developer’s corner

Please feed us your news

Hope you enjoyed reading this fortnight!

This is a community update, and frankly we can’t always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish Community. Plus, the less of this we have to actually write ourselves the better. So please help us out by posting your Sailfish news updates to the forum as a reply to this post. We’ll collate as much of it as possible into one easily digestible post for the next update. This is your news!

Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. The next community meeting will be on the 20th November. Please note change in the time slot due to the standard time change (6:00 PM EET).

Remember to follow us also in Mastodon jolla (@jolla@techhub.social) - TechHub

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