Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

What did you expect? They came from Nokia, at least for the most part. That is where they learned how to do things.

You said it, bro :(

A fellow TMO member once asked me about my Jolla experience to help him decide whether to buy one. Like me, he had an N900 and an N9 before. I just looked up my response, it was sent on 2014-12-17. It is quite long and I am not going to copy it here but I have to say, having re-read it again, it saddens me to see that none of the points I mentioned there have been addressed. For example, the lack of a global copy and paste.

Nevertheless, the gist of that write-up was, "it has some potential but it is not quite there yet", with an implied belief that it would get there eventually. Now, nearly a year on, I would have written a different summary: "The potential was there but has been completely wasted."

Yet I think there is still a chance. But that would require a complete U-turn on Jolla's side. Stop fidgeting with the UI. It is not perfect but it will do as it is. Focus on things people are actually asking for. Fix or implement basic functionality. Fix the truly terrible memory consumption and management. A bare OS, with no Android installed and no apps running, using 69% of the available RAM (gone up to 83% in 1.1.9) is a scandal. Fixing it may take a few months if you put your mind to it but it would be time well spent. That is exactly what Apple (Leopard->Snow Leopard) and Microsoft (Vista->7) did and it worked for them.

Otherwise the future is bleak. More and more peole will move on, leaving behind only those still refusing to accept the reality. As their concentration increases, so will their cognitive dissonance which they will vent by an increasing aggresivity towards the few remaining people with some common sense. Eventually, the only Jolla's users left would be the 1000 or so die-hard yes-men, Jolla will stop receiving any useful feedabck and the system will collapse. A business cannot exist with such a small user base for very long.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Well, I would like to add some words about Nemo and Open Source OS :
Nemo with Glacier is not fully unusable, and working on it is not building an UI from scratch. But yes, because of the lack of developers, it is not ready for an everyday use. however, I used it few days on my N900 (my main phone at this time) for testing purpose and it worked more or less. IMO, there is not so much work required for having an usable OS with the basics functions working well (if I remeber well, SMS were fully working and calls half working).

About the devices : there were working phones with Nemo when nobody talked about Sailfish : the N900 (which is now not maintained because of Wayland) and the N9. So if you have a N9, you have some hardware where you can test Nemo.

And finally, why someone could would like work on Nemo. In first, it's open-source. And there is one think especially great with the open source : diversity. Working on Nemo could provide an other choice of GNU/Linux phone distribution, and will add diversification.

But if you tell me that working on a abandonned OS with (as it seems) nobody working on it is less interresting than a one maintained by a compagny with many users using it, I can only agree but if you want a fully open-source OS, someone have to do the first step. And here, the first step is not to do everything from scratch but to work on existing code.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

We are tunned few years already. If there is some information - just give it to us. Because this "soon" thing is not funny anymore.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Right... wish me luck, I'm going to try and pull ths in a slightly more constructive direction and talk about something Jolla could change without turning their business model upside-down:

I read somewhere before that a big chunk of Red Hat support contracts are with the US military. If Jolla wants to capture part of the government/military market, they desperately need to improve the security model on Sailfish. There has been some talk of "Sailfish Secure" but as far as I can tell nothing has materialised so far.

Sailfish' security model sucks because it doesn't follow the principle of least privilege:

• Nemo can install packages without authentication (via pkcon)
• Installed apps run as nemo...
• ...installed apps could therefore install other things (that run as root) without authentication! I'm not really worried about malicious apps since most Sailfish apps are Free/Open Source, but if you subscribe to the Ubuntu security announcement list you'll see lots of bugs like "potentially allows remote command execution as the user firefox is running as"... I am worried about the fact that exploiting a security flaw in a single app could give you easy root via nemo.
• all kinds of other important stuff also runs as nemo (like systemd)

I think this is something Jolla could improve quite easily, without affecting their business model. Pretty sure the reason people don't bitch about this more is because they're used to it - n900's security model was pretty awful too, and really shocked me when I picked it up for the first time last year.

I forgave the n900 because it's an old design, but Sailfish is a modern OS and is way behind Android/iOS in this regard!

Why not:

• Create groups with permissions to read contact data, change network connections etc
• Require nemo to authenticate when installing applications (otherwise you might as well just run everything as root)
• Each app runs as its own user
• Only grant harbour-foo permissions for the groups required to do what it needs

Doesn't seem like a lot of work, we have the tools to do a lot of this already. The difficult bit would be the next step: showing a list of required permissions (groups) before installation, and allowing the user to grant/revoke them.

Does anyone know why this wouldn't work/hasn't been implemented already? Or can you think of any improvements?

Also related, the roadmap says Jolla researched SELinux some time ago, so maybe there's a more elegant way of achieving this using SELinux?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Agree completely.

Either sort the memory issue out, or else give us a new phone with more memory. It drives me crazy that we have these much vaunted multi-tasking capabilities that we simply can't use because apps have to be continuous recycled like in Android.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I sense a contradiction here:

and

Ok, here's the problem I see: as you say, the fully open mobile devices are still "toys on a board". Only the organizations that have adopted closed-source practices have devices viable for every-day work. So, just what are the advantages of Open Source, then? If, for example, Nemo can never become a viable product, why should anybody at Jolla want to adopt the same strategy as Nemo?

I guess I'm saying, can you really convince Jolla that full open-source is going to help their business? Cause right now, I'm just not seeing it...

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Absolutely. I'd been through a few Android phones before getting devices with 2GB and 3GB of RAM and on Android it's night and day compared to phones with 1GB or less. On Symbian it was always 'never buy a phone with less than 128MB' of course so it is kind of bonkers we're talking about multi-GB now but chips are a cheap fix.

Jolla expect to run Sailfish AND Android in less than 1GB so they either need to optimise the fudge out of Sailfish or port it to devices with more RAM.

...and fix CalDAV

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I'd love to share your point of view, but in the absence of viable fully open mobile operating systems, I'm not finding a lot of valid reasons to go open-source either. :(

Just where is the community support for community-based software? Why is there so much interest in trying to make commercial software open, when open-source alternatives already exist? And, if Jolla did fully open-source Sailfish, would anybody actually work on it, or would they just go to the next piece of commercially-built software and demand that it become open as well?

Cool! So, I've gotta ask, just where are the fully open Mer-based devices? Jolla doesn't have a patent on Mer or anything; just what is stopping another company from building one?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Good luck. :)

This is important notice. Years ago Red Hat effectively ditched consumer market and concentrated on enterprise only. It was sensible and successful choice for them. However, Sailfish doesn't compare to that as it's completely different kind of beast - it cannot succeed without being somewhat successful in the consumer market whereas Red Hat didn't have to give a flying duck about consumer space when working with enterprise/data center related stuff. So, Sailfish secure is definitely needed, but it cannot replace the consumer point of view. And it will take some time to implement, test, certificate etc...

I'd also like to point out that there are numerous endeavors that have ended up in bankruptcy or just ceased operations on FOSS consumer market. Even Canonical is funding their consumer desktop operations using revenue generated from enterprise as the consumer operations income don't really cover the costs. It may be different though within mobile space as it's more difficult to implement those sources into working device.

AFAIK this is not possible, as nemo doesn't have root-privileges and it cannot use those privileges without authentication. It does have more privileges than regular user in regular Linux server or desktop, this is one of those parts that are so because of usability - no regular user is willing to enter password every single time they want to install or update apps.

Another thing is that (if I understand it correctly, please correct me if I'm wrong) root privileges are by default beyond the reach of regular user in Sailfish. You need to enable developer mode and set the password to be able to get root privileges. This IMO is safer than having users with either default passwords or those 123456-style passwords for root in their devices. This doesn't mean that user or malicious software is not able to do harm, as the important stuff (like contacts, other personal data) needs to be accessed by nemo.

I don't think there is any elegant way of doing things with SELinux.... it's very effective way though, when done correctly. :)

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Check the xdg-app project, it aims to pretty much that - fully sandboxed GUI/desktop applications. Citing:

The xdg-app project might not be that easy to run on Sailfish OS as it might need some pretty cutting edge stuff to work (such as kdbus) but is still by far the best and most robust solution I have seen for running graphical apps in a sandbox (if we discount all the horrible platform specific hacks Android uses for this).