Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Why can't they? There are very few applications which use X11 directly, and if they do - they are in trouble yes, but it's nowhere near to 99%. The vast majority of them use higher level frameworks, and those are enabling Wayland support (Qt 5 included). Therefore they can and will be ported if their authors care.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Qt6 will be included in the first device for all we know. Again, the issue is not what actually is included, but they communicate what the he'll is included and what device they planning to ship.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

jalyst will hate us for derailing his thread so massively :)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Yeah, I really see no point in further complaints about X11. Get over it. Jolla decided to use Wayland, Nemo will use it as well. I hope Plasma Active will start using it soon enough. That's it. Adapt to it.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

It was nice derail though. Back to order.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

either you don't understand (which seems to be the case) or you have some secret knowlege. briefly explain how gtk2 / qt4 apps are going to run please.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

conerns and criticisms are not on topic?

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Their authors will rewrite them to use gtk 3 and Qt 5. If they aren't going to - it's their problem. Gtk2 and Qt4 will have EOL. Especially with Wayland replacing X11. On the desktop the grace period is longer, since no one is rushing, and drivers aren't even here yet (no Nvidia EGL drivers for example). On the mobile it came already. Update it or drop it (the application) the way I see it.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

ok, explain how to run a python qt5 app on jolla then.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Python bindings for Qt is community supported now, so it's being developed slower than "official" parts of Qt. So you have several options, either wait until Qt 5 support will be implemented, help implementing that to speed it up or rewrite the application on C++. Another option, implement / test support of XWayland for Mer. However I don't think you should expect Jolla to do any of it. It's not their priority.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

like i said before

ok, so the current situation is:

maemo apps, meego apps, and 99.99% of existing linux apps can't run on or be ported to jolla. but it can run quite a lot of android apps, but not as much as a dedicated android device. and if you rewrite your app in c++ and specifically target the jollaphone only ,it can run it.

i'd cry if it wasn't so funny.


NO X11=ANDROID

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I'm not sure where you got the idea that 99% of something is using Python with Qt. By far Qt promotes using C++ for logic with QML for the interface. As I said - either port your application, work on Python support for Qt 5, work on XWayland in Mer or quit complaining.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I have already posted a solution to that question. But to repeat myself its upto the community to build/change pyside to work with qt5.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I'm finding it very difficult to agree with that stance, mainly because Jolla released their SDK and the purpose of that SDK was to enable developers to start developing in an environment that would closely match their final product. Jolla have now decided to change significant parts of the operating system that will affect many developers and throw away several months of their work. Those developers may not necessarily have the expertise to port PySide to Qt5. What are they supposed to do? The community is ready to help Jolla become a success but this is a kick in the teeth.

I'm actually pleased that Jolla are moving forward with Wayland and Qt5 however they have gone about it completely the wrong way. IMHO, if Jolla are going to ship their product with Wayland and Qt5, they need to ensure that both XWayland and PySide are also ready to ship otherwise they should proceed with their original plan that was to launch with X11 and Qt4 and then release an update for Wayland and Qt5 when they are ready.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Canonical has said that Ubuntu Touch 13.10 will have Mir, but not XMir, which will be available only for PC's. But there is an interview last month citing that Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu for PC's will be unified in 2014 (14.04 version) suggesting that Ubuntu Touch would have XMir to make desktop convergence (i.e., a smartphone become a PC by connecting mouse, keyboard and display).

So it is not clear when/if/in each cases Ubuntu Touch will have XMir.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Another noted way of fanboys; to bunch everybody regardless of whether they providing constructive criticism or just criticism for the sake of it into the same group of people who "cry"...

Sadly, while people have been saying TMO is heated + has many fanboys or "old fanboys" in your words, the amount of level-headed people who are turning into pure Sailfish defenders is growing.

This thread's purpose was for ideas/questions as well as concerns/criticisms but more and more its turned into stupid wars by people who attack Sailfish blindly and others like you and mikecomputing who go on personal attacks blindly.

Like I have said previously, constructive criticism will help Jolla as people have always had a soft corner for them due to the incidents at Nokia. However, when the situation of an uncooperative management, i.e. Nokia, no longer exists, Jolla need to back-up their far-reaching decisions with proper communication.

I read on IRC that Stskeeps said he too gets things wrong. Nothing wrong with that but I would like to know from them what developments led them to believe their Qt4.8+X11 decision was right in the first place and only very recently actually a poor decision hence them going for Qt5+Wayland.

Would their abrupt move lead to any delays from the oft-said shipping date of end of this year? If such things were put out in a blog etc in a short wall of text it would have been much clearer from the time of their decision.

Yes the average Joe doesn't care about this decision but surely those first in line to buy the Jolla device and spread the word are not the average Joes but most likely people from places like here.

An unlike company does need to be more communicative to its main target group. Its funny how this is something that has been repeated a gazillion times yet tweets are still the main info source.


Exactly! Its upto an individual to decide instead of being bashed around by tools like mikecomputing imploding people to contribute!

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

More on this later.....

TBH I'm not really seeing how that extract proves anything. It depends on WHEN "turning the boat around" is suicide according to their perceived definition.
He did allude to Jolla doing that "later"... Perhaps they made a calculated decision that turning it around (as they recently have) was/is the right time.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=90761

Siiiiigh..... :p

We've made very clear what the formula of this thread is meant to be, even since you've been active here.

Python bindings can't even be considered as "relying on the community", given that Jolla has at least 1 employee working on it. So it's not a situation where people can whine that "Jolla's just throwing it out to the community once again". I'd also like to see a stronger commitment towards XWayland, so far they're being quite non-committal on that. I don't think they have to put a significant chunk of resources into either area, but if they put a "light touch" into both, just to steer the community in the right (coordinated) direction & help it gain momentum, then that'd be a good gesture/start.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

XWayland has been said it will not be supported in the core and its upto the community/thirdparty to add it. Thats enought communication for me.

They had pointed the community to nemo and mer several times. I don't see what more directions people needs?

People are free to ask questions on IRC in #mer and #nemo and #sailfish channels and Mer mailinglist.

BUT It sounds more like those who are most angry has not even written a line of code and/or is misunderstanding what wayland is about?

Whatever we write here we repeating ourself until dead. People does not bother to read what already has been posted.

his has now been discussed in > five days. Its time to move on. Its Wayland and Qt5. and there is possibility to make pyside work in Qt5. And in that case contact the maintainers of Pyside

ask the maintainer if there is any direction of Qt5 support.

and in case of XWayland check the nemo community and the mer mailinglist.

I am sure most developers prefer this direction. And it has nothing todo if people are jolla fanboys or not.

Now time for me to go back todays plans: Learning django :cool:

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I've gotta ask, why do you think developers who want to port their apps to a new ecosystem should do all that? shouldnt that be jolla's job to take care of it? . Dont you think jolla is being too stubborn here?

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Well, the issue of Python bindings for Qt5 might be close to a solution, thanks to THPs work on alternative bindings called PyOtherSide, see his recent blog post about this & source code (not yet updated to reflect the blogpost).

Also THP recently started working in Jolla, which might influence things in the right direction in regards to Python. Still some semi-official clarification from Jolla about Python (& Python version - 2 or 3 ?) would be nice. :)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Well, this was already posted several times. Still it was ignored by some people.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Does Jolla intend that the Sailfish platform should be OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant, in order that app developers can have surety that in targetting new API's they don't disqualify a large proportion of the potential audience?

Even if OpenGL ES 3.0 support doesn't arrive in v1.0 of Sailfish, at least ensure the hardware is compliant:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...20#post1360320

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

IMHO people who never touched the Sailfish Alpha SDK shouldn't be complaining at all about technical issues/shortcomings/incompatibilities.
The others should wait for the new SDK with Wayland and Qt5 and will then realize how easy it is to port code from Qt4 to Qt5 usually.
And you'll probably not even realize that there's Wayland instead of X11, except for having better performance.

With PySide code the situation will look differently, but it was never advertised for Sailfish development in the first place. It's a dead Nokia project. It's opensource and you can try port it to Qt5 if it's worth, or wait and see what PyOtherSide will be capable of. Probably PyOtherSide will be the cleaner and faster approach to bring QML and Python together.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Are you a developer yourself? If yes, you should now already that developing is moving forward not backward. Stuff changes all the time. Also developers inside Jolla knows that.

Python3 not backward compatible with 2
Qt4 not backward compatible with Qt3
Gnome2 not compatible with Gnome1

X11 not backward compatible with itself.

And in case of computer languages: New languages comes and others dies.

and so on...

If you are a developer and dont like movement you will get into trouble thats for sure.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

OK do we have a conclusion here?
What is the bottom line - is Sailfish burning or cool platform? :p :D

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

http://www.jollausers.com/2013/07/wh...-a-comparison/

:cool:

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

The conclusion? Sailfish is a cool new OS. But it's till unknown and we can't if it good for the enduser or not.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

What i meant... its their job to make sure its possible and easy for developers to port apps rather than pointing developers to do efforts for them. "The way forward" and "contributing" is BS if a company fails to do that.
Btw, since i never said anything about changes your answer was irrelevant.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

...that's that certain

"do it yourself (or at least don't complain to someone), you can do it yourself because "everythings' open", if you won't / can't "contribute", you are against us and should just f*ckoff."

FOSS mentality you'll never get away from their minds. You cannot "win" (arguments).

Not even when we are talking about a commercial provider here, that wants to get traction with an unproven platform even before any shipments and of course also wants (your) money by selling you devices.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

They're already doing A LOT that'll benefit others moving into the same area*, with very limited resources mind you.
It's unreasonable to expect that they alone must drive the entire XWayland & Python bindings initiatives.
They've already made a solid start on the latter, it remains to be seen if they'll do the same for the former.
But if they eventually do, then the whining really needs to be dialled down, dramatically...

*Hello Canonical -Who's already taken code from Jolla/Others "internally" a few times
They've typically released it later, but only after being pressed, & it's not been released in a friendly manner

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Unreasonable? Dude you sound like "we have to support jolla at any cost"... commercial firm + their decisions + their additional work = their problem, if not sailfish why not tizen... what happened to go with what fills your need. By buying their product you are already risking your money and supporting them enough seeing its a new ecosystem and a new firm. Im not saying we should not support them, i just dont see a reason why if theyre unwilling to make needed efforts. Cmon see samsung and tizen, im not asking jolla to throw cash though, just saying how much theyre lacking to make developers intrested in their ecosystem in a much crowded fierce competition.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Yup, unreasonable to expect them to be the sole arbiter & driver of large projects that benefit far more than just Sailfish, completely unreasonable.
As said, they've already made some significant strides towards a solution for the entire community (not just Sailfish) when it comes to Python/Qt bindings.
Hopefully others will jump on-board & help with that, I've no doubt they will, it always happens....
It'd be great to see them make a similar start with XWayland, unreasonable to expect them to do it completely & utterly on their own though...

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Then i cant help but say "each to their own", still you have a point there. I do wish luck to jolla though, and i am curious to what lies ahead especially about wayland and qt5, in future i may even get a jolla device if it turns out right. But incase i wasnt clear this is the point i was trying to make....

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Yup, I'm basically just waiting on THP to publish the updated PyOtherSide code, so I can start playing with it. :)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I disagree. The current situation for mobile developers from Maemo/MeeGo/Nemo Mobile to Sailfish pathway is IMHO :

1) softwares in C/C++/Qt 4.7-4.8 (Qt Quick 1) : about 80-90% of MeeGo Harmattan and Nemo Mobile softwares, just some % of Maemo 5 softwares. Anyway due to migration from GUI written in (Harmattan, etc) Qt Quick components to Sailfish Silica (Qt Quick components for GUI in Sailfish OS), there is a need of small-medium source code revision & rewrite. There are 2 options for Qt5/Wayland migration :

1.a) XWayland (X11 running as a Wayland client) be available by Jolla and/or community, so all Qt 4/X11 softwares will remain compatible. Jolla said "just to clarify, while we don't support xwayland atm, we're not ruling out the possibility in future...". It seems XWayland source code isn't long, just some hundreds of lines of code. So, as Jolla itself is open to include XWayland (with the community help, i.e., in Nemo Mobile Wayland effort) and XWayland is a lot smaller than Wayland, I think it is possible to have XWayland ready on Sailfish OS until the end of 2013 (but not included in the Sailfish SDK beta which is soon to be released);

1.b) migrate to Qt 5/Qt Quick 2, which seems to be easy, with minor source code revision & rewrite, then recompile. This work may be worth to also release Qt 5 versions for Ubuntu Touch, Android and iOS (changing from the Qt components from Silica to Qt Components for Ubuntu or Qt Quick Controls);

2) softwares in Python/PySide/Qt 4.7-4.8 (Qt Quick 1) : only about 10-20% of MeeGo Harmattan and Nemo Mobile softwares, just some small % of Maemo 5 softwares. But Python is important, allowing party-time developers to code on device (N900, N9, etc), anytime, anywhere, and contribute to the software diversity. The same migration from Harmattan (etc) Qt Quick components to Sailfish Silica is needed, with small-medium source code revision & rewrite. There are more options for Qt5/Wayland migration, none ready at the moment :

2.a) the same (1.a) option, i.e., release XWayland for Sailfish OS, so PySide and Qt 4.8 could be used in Sailfish as in Sailfish SDK alpha;

2.b) port PySide to Qt5/Qt Quick 2, which has no timeline and is a huge task needing contribution. This effort would benefit Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, Android and iOS developing in Python/Qt5/Qt Quick 2. So it is expected that Jolla will not contribute (alone) for this huge work;

2.c) use a future PyQt 5 version, because the current one excludes Qt Quick 2. There is also the issue of GPL license and release PyQt 5 for Mer/Nemo/Sailfish;

2.d) use PyOtherSide from thp, which will have a version for Qt5/Qt Quick 2 released soon. It is not a Qt 5 full binding for Python, but it seems a way to code (the GUI) in Qt Quick 2 and call Python from it (so Qt5 is not available from Python, only Python is available from Qt5/Qt Quick 2). As advantages, PyOtherSide is smaller, faster to load and is/will be multiplataform (Symbian, Android, MeeGo, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, etc).

So, non-Python developers have a migration path currently available to Qt5/Wayland on Sailfish. Only Python developers are in a wait-to-see/code situation, the easier one seems to be PyOtherSide (2.d).

About the change from Sailfish SDK alpha (with Qt 4.8 & X11) to Sailfish SDK beta (Qt 5 & Wayland) : yes, it is a bad surprise for developers who have already ported/created softwares using Sailfish SDK alpha. But currently there are a very small number (10-20) of softwares written for Sailfish, see the app list in Sailfish - Mer Wiki. So this 'collateral effect' is small.

I trust the Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Mer/Nemo/Sailfish community efforts so that more than one good solution will be available for developing Sailfish softwares.

I hope XWayland will be released on Sailfish, so X11 legacy will be available : ssh -X, chrooting Debian/etc, many Linux desktop softwares not Wayland compatible, etc.

No, there are many differences between Android and Linux, not only X11 : lack of glibc (so porting Linux softwares is a difficult task), fake multitasking, no dependencies (like .deb or .rpm, so the user sometimes install the same library 5 times repeated wasting storage space), no open development with community participation, no community repository (for libraries, dependencies, etc), etc.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Why would Android allow Jolla to use their apps? Its not gonna happen.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Let me play devil's advocate here and add 'why not android'

if you port your app to android instead of jolla, then:
1. you've probably learned valuable(literally) dev skills
2. there's a good chance it will run on jolla
3. you don't need to worry about jolla changing their mind again.
4. you don't have to get involved in porting toolkits or xwayland (which was a serious suggestion by one member!!)
5. your potential audience is 10's of millions

win win.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

And, how do you propose they're going to stop that, without looking like total pariahs?
(much less wasting a large amount of resources stopping what's mostly a positive thing for them)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Regarding open repos; ever heard of things like F-Droid.org? And in regards to wasting storage space: yes that's real world problem, but... after going through DLL hell (again) on Maemo, i now appreciate if upgrading some library for some tool doesn't break a multitude of other apps too. Besides that, i don't care about space, 16 to 32GB seems to be the norm now.

And besides porting Linux applications; without them being touch-optimized there are more issues than missing out on glibc calls.

I give you on the fake multitasking, really. It could be better. Just so much: In the end (real world experiences for 8 months now), it impacted me less than i feared. Because everything that is fake-switched in Androids method of things just works. No RAM shortage, no DLL hell, no lame processor. And if devs implement background tasks, nothing is lost. So much for theories.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I'm the owner of a Asus Transformer TF101 tablet + Asus Eee Dock, rooted, with Ubuntu chroot, etc. And also a Nexus 4, but mainly for Ubuntu Touch. Yeah, I know F-Droid catalog since a long ago, this is an alternative way of installing softwares, while on Maemo 4/Maemo 5 third-party softwares (libraries, softwares with GUI, etc) are first class softwares available in Maemo.org repositories.

My N900 has more than 100 softwares installed, many programming tools, Easy Debian, etc. And I've never had any problem of library conflict breaking other apps.

I really have some libraries 5x repeated in my Android tablet. Some simple softwares take 10MB where 9.9MB are dependencies embedded...

Well, take Linux libraries and CLI tools, without GUI, without glibc it's a nightmare to port them to Android. Some aren't yet even after years of effort from the Android community.

Sorry, but after 1 year and half of Asus TF101 (Android 4.0) experience and even some tests of Android 4.2.2 on Nexus 4, I am the witness of many situations of softwares been closed, losing real state, etc. All my friends who are developers and have Android devices cite the same thing, it happens with all Android versions, all hardwares. A mobile OS (Android 4.2.2) on a quad core CPU and 2GB of RAM (of Nexus 4) showing it can't deal with real multitasking (even using Android default softwares) is a joke, a dumbed down OS.

RAM and CPU aren't features of the OS. And even with background tasks, Android softwares have multitasking limitations (even native ones).

Sorry, I am a ex-Psion (EPOC 16/32) user&developer, where a 32-bit real multitasking mobile OS (with micro-kernel) on a 16MB of RAM was a lot better than current mobile OS in stability, multitasking, advanced features, etc. My Psion Revo+ lasted 2 years without rebooting, even while I was programming on device in OPL anywhere, anytime.

So, from my ex-Psion point of view, Android, iOS and Windows Phone are just dumbed down mobile OS.