Sailfish OS update from Jolla
We have had super busy past two weeks. One big thing that we have been waiting is that Sailfish 5 is now in the Early Access for the all supported devices. Generally speaking feedback has been positive – thank you for your feedback and keep feeding the input. Idea is that we’d live with the Sailfish 5.0 for some time and create updates for it like we did with the Sailfish 4.6.
End of the last week Sailfish OS was present on the Linux on Mobile stand at FOSDEM alongside AsteroidOS, LINMOB and Mobian. The stand was super crowded & busy all the time, must have been 500 - 1000 persons visiting the stand during these two days. What great talks there were. Occasionally people were queueing to see the Linux on Mobile stand. All in all, I think this year was even busier than the year before. It was so great to see people visiting, saying hi and excited about our products. Maybe next year we have even stronger team collaborating with others and maybe a slightly bigger table 
. Big thanks also to @flypig on helping to organize.
FOSDEM BoF (Birds of a Feather)
On Sunday we had a BoF (Birds of a Feather) to discuss various community topics. We had a great discussion on the roadmap that would be following after Sailfish 5.0. It’s quite self-evident that both Jolla C2 and Jolla Mind2 devices themselves are feeding items to the roadmap – of course also feedback that we hear from the Sailfish Community. We didn’t discuss about actual release numbers rather focused on the content. It was mentioned that we are working on GCC and systemd updates. The software architecture of the Jolla Mind2 with Venho.Ai drives also improvements to the Sailfish Core for example Go language compiler is in the works and nerdctl already integrated. It was mentioned that there is already work done for Gecko ESR 102, one bigger change with the ESR 102 would be that we’d finally swap the rendering pipeline to the WebRenderer. Let’s see what kind of collaboration efforts there will be around this. Would be nice to team up in this front as well. Last but not least, there was an interesting questions about unified push – something that we should take a look. I think with these ingredients we already have a recipe for the next bigger release but before that there will be smaller updates.
Directions on open sourcing were discussed. Essentially the reborn Jolla company setup enables us to effectively return on the topic and make a step-by-step plan e.g. to remove obstacles hindering community contributions and see how it starts to go - in this context, examples like replacing the broken Sailfish Weather with MeeCast surfaced. We’ll keep you updated – stay tuned!
Good time was spent to discuss about community communication channels and methods. We should try to find ways how could we communicate better with AsteroidOS and other projects near by. We do have our usual fortnight newsletters and IRC meetings. How should we evolve & improve in this front? I’ll raise this topic for the next community IRC meeting.
After the BoF we have had great discussions with the microG maintainer Marvin Wißfeld. With the latest Sailfish 5.0 release the newest microG version (0.3.6) creates a huge leap for many (in particular newcomers willing to transition from Android/iOS) on daily driveability of the Sailfish OS - we actually have a true Linux phone which you can use for daily life with 4G VoLTE and extend with AppSupport + microG to such as public transport ticket apps, parking your car and even mobile banking. Certainly there are bugs still (and please report!) but the microG 0.3.6 now enables us to start tackling also those in AppSupport. Target is that during the spring we’ll bring microG to the Jolla Store and integrate it further to Sailfish OS to install and take into use with a simple click-thru-UI – surely there will be intermediate releases in between.
Energy from the Community
On Saturday evening we had a Sailfish meetup at Brussels in the Black Sheep. The cosy setup worked very well – thank you @abranson for organizing and for the AsteroidOS team to join!
Thank you @rubdos for the photo
Repository roundup
Browser stack
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qtmozembed, Qt bindings for the Gecko engine, pvuorela added wheel support and also in the browser itself. -
sailfish-browser, the browser application itself, mal fixed the URL to get user agent updates. pvuorela fixed an issue of focus of the URL field and some other UI glitches, like:- avoid flicking the favorites on top of the history button,
- avoid the notch area in setting pages and in other places.
Network, communication and telephony stack
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connman, the connection manager, LaakkonenJussi is working on exposing tethering client IPs over D-Bus. -
messagingframework, the email Qt framework, dcaliste fixed an issue recently introduced by the credential refactoring affecting the IMAP idle functionality. He also proposed a fix for IMAP idle session not being able to restart itself on failure.
Main interface
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nemo-qml-plugin-thumbnailer, the QML bindings to get image thumbnails, pvuorela adde some checks on sizes to avoid generating huge thumbnails. -
libmediaart, a library for handling media art, pvuorela updated it to 1.9.6, bringing a fix for a memory leak. -
lipstick, the home screen code (open source parts), pvuorela ensured that wheel events are properly distributed to visible windows. He also added code to load translations for QML plugins. -
nemo-qml-plugin-systemsettings, QML bindings to access system parameters, pvuorela moved the disk usage action into a thread. It seems that on VFAT filesystem, it can takes some seconds after being mounted.
Low level libraries
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profiled, manages user settings, pvuorela avoided reallocations of size zero. -
icu, a library for the International Components for Unicode, mal updated it to 73.2. -
openssl, utilities and library for cryptography, pvuorela aligned a bit more the packaging on Fedora one.
Developer’s corner
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libsailfishapp, Sailfish application library, neochapay updated the code to work with Qt 6. -
crash-reporter, a tool to report application crashes, pvuorela removed some unnecessary string conversions. -
mlite, the configuration storage library, pvuorela updated the API by renamingMGConfItemintoMDConfItem, after all,dconfhas replacedgconfa long time ago. The old name is still provided but marked as deprecated. He then migrated repositories using it to the new naming scheme: -
sb2-tools-template, scratchbox2 cross compilation tools, mal proposed to add x86_64 architecture. -
systemd, a system and service manager, mal fixed a build issue when used with GCC 13. -
telepathy-accounts-signon, telepathy providers for libaccounts/libsignon, mal fixed build issues with recent version of GCC and also intelepathy-qt.
Please feed us your news
As always, please do not hesitate to share your ideas, thoughts, or suggestions for future newsletter topics.
Let’s keep working together!
Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. The next community meeting will be on the 13th February. Let’s start then discussing community communication tools and methods – if nothing else.