Where to go after Sailfish?

General
#188

Something like that or better said: in these two countries were freedom and democracy are not particularly appreciated the need for a “backup communication network” are much more felt as a priority up to necessity. In both cases the “regime” of the two countries is aligned also with the security of the nation even if - unfortunately - it is not their main concerne.

This is an auto-referential paradigm.

It is a well-know fact that the market let win weaker technical solutions…

For example, despite the Microsoft Windows NT kernel was designed to compete with the best in class OSes, it never reached the masses but Win95 → Win98. The MS-DOS was a pale resemble of IBM-DOS in terms of technology but was much easier to copy because the lack of protection on the floppy disks. Piracy does the rest spreading around the one which was similar in functionalities but easier to copy. The GNU hurd micro-kernel was a promising technology but the student Linus’ monolithic kernel took the place in the heart and in the x86 HDs of many.

Technical superiority wins only in small niches which requires that superiority to exist. The SFOS is not a mainstream solution, obviously and to affirm itself in its niche should bring a sort of technical superiority but because it aims to be installed on smartphone - it should also complains with the end-users market dictatorship. This is the reason because they moved their business in a niche: automotive. It is the wrong niche, IMHO.

Returning on the 2G/3G shutting down: the telecom companies have a clear interest in left behind a commercial obsolete infrastructure to increase their savings/returns and/or investing in the next generation technology or expanding the current. Obviously, they do no care about the nation security which can be affected in many different ways or in a special cases like Switzerland just a little.

Moreover, the regulators usually do not have any specific advantage to intervene and being hated by these large and somewhat powerful companies. Until the day an emergency on a vast will hit the country and shock the people. At that point they will leverage the emotional wave of the nation to spend taxes in build a backup telecommunication network that they let commercial companies dismantle.

Build - destroy - rebuild. A market/business mantra: instead of supporting an obsolete technology, destroy it and the re-sell again as a national security technology at added value price the next time for the sake of deep pockets states.

Not in Hungary nor in Italy because their regimes fear too much a “time window” of insecurity not about natural catastrophes but because possible riots. Usually when a riots in a large area took place the 3G->5G services will go to be shut-down and 2G remains only for voice coordination among the repression forces. Under the PoV of the regime is an emergency to deal with as efficiently as possible in case prevention countermeasures did not succeed enough.

#189

This is the main reason because an OS refactoring that starts from the current available SFOS and aim to obtain as much free as possible OS maintaining the HW and the apps compatibility goes toward the interest of the SFOS community included developers and towards the interest of a company like Jolla Oy that has bigger concerns that keep in consideration the needs of their beta-testers ouch sorry end-users¹.

Why did not happen in the past? Well, it is clear that in the community there is a HUGE lack of people with embedded systems and system administration skills plus a certain politically blindness to see the market and the business without strong biases - in one way or in the opposite way, both.

After all, the choice is always at the people disposition (aka stakeholders) in a range that can vary between collaboration for innovations and obstructionism/rejection of the novelty.

note

¹ just few examples: the recovery image is distributed even if it is clearly useless for the devices for which is packed and delivered, even the telnet IP cannot be read when a single PNG image (30m of work, not more) available only for the default address (99.99% of the cases) would have solved the problem. The userdata image is delivered truncated but let ignore this “very technical detail”, after all everything seem working and dmesg -Hw is so absurdly overpopulated by errors that even fixing that aspect will not bring so much value. Again, the “take a selfie” in the top menu should be renamed “Camera” (30m of work, not more). Clearly, the problem is even deeper than a lack of embedded system and system administration skills. This wrote in a friendly and polite way.

#190

Not sure how aggressive feedback would sound then :sweat_smile:
I agree that there are many unpolished features, and a lot of minor and major bugs in sailfish. If you don’t like it you’re free to move on, instead of spewing bile. Feedback is most of the time welcome, and I’m not trying to stop you from giving your opinion, but I’m not really getting a good vibe, in the sense that I feel you want to contribute. What is your goal, really? Stiring the pot? Waking the sheep?

I’ve been in the s/w industry for quite a while and most of that in the embedded world (as in bare metal) and know how hard it can be to get h/w to “behave”. And comparing the resources between Jolla, Apple and Google I must say that Jolla does a phenomenal job (as both iOS and Android have their own issues).

1 Like
#191

Jolla is too small and Sailfish is too niche to do a Red Hat/Suse model, and Jolla need a way to pay their develpers. That means they have to make some (from FOSS perspective) unpopular decisions. And the community agrees to this, somewhat, as they probably understand this. It’s a give and take (symbiosis in best case scenario) and I don’t mind being an end-user/beta-tester.

I guess there might be an issue with “paying customers” and expectations of a full-fledged, stable OS. Here you have a point, but I don’t think those users are that active here, so I’m not sure yoi will get anything from driving this, beyond self-satisfaction or high blood pressure.

#192

I believe this is their dilemma - originally they were actually on to something, then their need to meet the market made it unremarkable. Now they compete on the same battle grounds as Apple and Google manufactorers, and will be slaughtered. Remember BlackBerry, that were superior, but forgot the consumer market and now almost forgotten themselves.

That’s capitalism for you. :grin:

#193

I don’t even want to read this forum anymore because of the off-topic flooding of a certain you know who.

10 Likes
#194

i am feeling the same way

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#195

Also Microsoft failed with its Surface smartphones. For a non-complete but insightful list of KIAs on the smartphones OS battlefield we can easily account: Nokia, Microsoft, Blackberry, and others?

First of all, thanks for your insightful PoV.

  • I do mind to being a beta-tester as end-users because I do not like it
  • I do mind to being a beta-tester as IT geek because I see an opportunity

As you can see, the same thing for the same person can be negative or positive depending in which role s/he put her/himself.

  • I do NOT care about unpopular decisions / opinions, as you can easily imagine

The main question is: are that decisions from the Jolla Oy profit point of view good for real or not in fact or can be improved? I have highlighted profit because profit is not always or necessary related to selling or producing or licensing.

  • Most of the Starbuck’s profits does not came from selling coffee or drinks.
  • Most of the McDonalds’ profits does not came from selling hamburgers, french-fries, etc…
  • Most of the Microsoft profits does not came from selling Windows licenses.
  • Most of the Google profits does not came from selling Android licenses.
  • Most of the Tesla profits does not came from producing and selling cars.

More in general, those companies that need to enforce a license (= restriction) over your customers to generate the most part of their profits, usually does not appear in fortunes 500.

  • Nvidia is the last $1Tn-unicorns-club entry member AND they did not enforced their licensing policy for more that 20 years and probably they will never do.

I give a point here to you, in fact writing that phrase sounds just the opposite. The bugs reports are nothing personal and nobody should feel under attack for them but this is not what upsets me. It is the attitude that hurts me and about attitude people start to fee a personal issue.

In few words: but they have more important things to care about polishing UI.

Yes, sure!

Update: part of this comment has been moved here:

Which is exactly what I am doing by now because there is no any viable way to debug and fix their OS until these three facilities are in place unless you wish to waste your time as you were an immortal highlander. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

Obviously, if - I do - these three facilities, then I do to put myself in the most independent position from Jolla Oy - not necessarily against their interests or profit opportunities - simply I do not put those “values” in any place of my working TODO list.

This also means that reached a certain point of skills / acknowledgement about mobile devices system, I will move away from SFOS as much as possible or completely because there is no reason to work for free (gratis) on a closed-source product and a no-career opportunities company. Unless you believe that I am an AI and I do not need to buy food¹. :wink:

IMHO, it is a good reason to stop barking at me and help me instead, for what you can do.

I do not like the “following me” attitude because I am expecting from other people that they reasonable follow their own interests like “rationale economics agents” cit. Adam Smith which nowadays demonstrated to be as much obsolete as Karl Marx but for both not completely obsolete or at least not at the point for which we cannot learn anything useful from them without necessarily accept their theories in full.

Cheers, R-

note

¹ it is necessary to specify for some Italians that think “I can be leveraged because I am in need to buy food” nice try but I am the wrong person because I never had the problem of buying food and paying bills for a common life-style and I will never have such a problem also in the future with a high degree of confidence - apart catastrophes and war and in that conditions probably I will be still luckier that many others - I wrote that just to sympathize with those have to work for living and to make a neat distinction with the AIs.

1 Like
#196

Hi gfwp, I’m testing out Volla OS (on a Volla X23) right now after 10 years of Jolla and it’s quite OK. I still do miss many cool features of Sailfish OS but I had the same situation, old phone was about to die and I did not find any Sony for a reasonable price anymore… and btw also in Switzerland (Salt).

3 Likes
#197

Or a Chat GPT bot I would add

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#198

There are three kind of wo/men nowdays:

  1. those are capable of a deeper thinking compared to GPT4¹
  2. those have a lesser deep thinking compared to GPT3.5
  3. those whom do not know yet

I would add another sub-set:

  1. those would not even be able to pass the Turing test and therefore cannot separate humans from machines.

The 4th category can be considered a sort of hall of fame but in reversed order… :innocent:

After all, between 20 and 25% of the children are not generated by the man who is supposed to be their father and this ratio is almost constant around the world among all the cultures and countries.

We did not need the raise of AIs to know that the 4th category exist and it is quite full of people considering that 4 x 25% is 100%. We know that - proved by science - since the paternity test based on DNA has been invented and before we had a good estimation when we discovered the blood types and their genetic transmission rules.

note

¹ Chat+GPT, the LLM engine is GPT while the chatbot is the front-end try to limit it and censored its thinking in order to not bring offence and harm to humans, and now we knows that some humans are s****d enough to be tricked by a LLM without the protective filter of a chatbot - from real, they needed to implement that not just blabla.

#199

Only a machine would argue so much as you, that IT is a human.

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#200

You think that because you never met my mother in real person.
She can argue about nothing for hours, days, years… :rofl:

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#201

Thanks.

Good to know. I’m on Sunrise. I guess, for us VoLTE is mandatory

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#203

That’s why … now I understand :wink:

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#205

@robang74
I enjoyed your posts to the extreme. I am afraid most here are unable to understand. I observed a 50% cognitive decline every 10y. So if you are 1974 you can imagine what a 1994 would understand :slight_smile:
They do not know what fun is (irony, sarcasm).
My grandfather however enjoyed the conversations with me when I was 20. Now I do not with few exceptions. But these exceptions are worth living and believing that there is still hope

thank you for the entertaining comments

BR

2 Likes
#206

So thinking differently from you = cognitive decline? Seriously cognitive decline happens when you get older, this is a fact.

Back on topic, I think it’s clear that SFOS is not for the average Joe and Jolla desperately needs a partner.
On the other hand if you consider SFOS an evolution of MeeGo, it’s been around for 10 years, it won’t die so fast.
Personally I hope that in the future one can install whatever (linux) OS on the phone without worrying too much about hardware and software compatibility. The same that happened to linux on desktop essentially, now hardware support is great and wine works in most scenarios. But it took some time to get there…

5 Likes
#207

Could you maybe explain some of your methodology?
Maybe there is unexpected wisdom in your words, young man.

2 Likes
#208

Some component which are indispensable are closed source and proprietary. The day Jolla Oy will terminate its business, those components could be probably lost forever and whatever you can say about - I do not see around anyone that can write them from scratch also because none apart the Jolla employees and ex-employees have any kind of knowledge about their internals. Therefore the saga will last few years after the Jolla Oy mobile devices business termination, in the best case.

Some people did a porting to not officially supported devices but also those porting contains the same proprietary closed source stuff. Is it right?

NEWS UPDATE

My Sony Xperia 10 II arrived on 26th May 2023. On 26th June, I proposed myself like a product manager with the aim to refactoring SFOS in order move forward toward a better new generation of SFOS (code-name RedFish OS):

  • more open
  • more stable
  • more independent
  • better hardware support

Which seems a too-big-too-achieve promise but considering that at the moment - the community, at least - lacks of basic tools and skills about embedded system, the receipt is quite straightforward:

  • lack of basic tools → huge bottlenecks, once we have the tools the bottlenecks are out of the scene and we can start focusing on the lack of embedded systems skills

  • lack of skills → in part this gap depends on the lack of proper tools, therefore it can be fulfill quite easily and in part tutorials and mini-courses could develop the skills

Giving to every aspect 1/N of weight - flat hypotheses - it is possible to address properly 3/4 of those gaps in a reasonable time. Then, it is supposed that things will start to happen by themselves faster and faster.

#209

It is not cognitive decline but bigotry that swipe off synapses like it were Alzheimer. After all, a bigotry youngster is thinking like an old granny. That’s it! :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

1 Like