Thread: Fairphone
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Posts: 2,076 | Thanked: 3,268 times | Joined on Feb 2011
#172
Originally Posted by wicket View Post
What's wrong with sfdroid for this?


If having a comfortable experience is your main concern then you are better off using an Android phone than Alien Dalvik. Solutions like sfdroid have a chance to be as good as Alien Dalvik but not if they get ignored.

This community exists because of free software. Free software largely defines it. Making proprietary software a decisive device purchasing factor hurts it and leads me to wonder why you are even here in the first place. Purchase a Fairphone not because it might run Alien Dalvik should some corporate overlords decide so, purchase it because it's likely that it will run sfdroid.
Because even commercial endeavour is still far from perfect and every new device is going to make it even worse. Teamviewer on phone works reliably (seen reports on TJC suggesting it took couple of months), not so on tablet. Having a company of people who are paid to look into such issues does not guarantee solutions, but at least gives hope. With community effort you have volunteers who might or might not be interested in the specific app that doesn't work for you and the community is nowhere near as active as it used to be, or numerous. Reverse engineering wifi drivers, community OTA updates or power kernel are very unlikely to happen. Fragmentation of android and devices makes it even worse as it's not hacking on the same HW all at the same time like with n900, but every device has its own quirks and irks. On top of that you have the bleeding edge making Sailfish a linux that can't run 99% of graphical linux software - Wayland (and SDL2 only and everything else that entails). Plenty of community members who could assist/participate on N900 as all you had to do was apt-get gcc and start tinkering on how to make a given app work are now having an unpassable gap. With maemo using same technologies you might've needed to research a bit to tweak the code here or there, comment that line, adjust this for ARM to get it working, resolution, maybe change a few parameters in the makefile, now most programs need serious rewrite (SDL 1.2->2, XWayland with no input...). The teamviewer actually looks like a very useful thing on a tablet that makes me consider flashing it with android as it should work normally there, hate myself for saying this (there are also lots of hacks around making normal X apps working in android which fail thanks to alien dalvik on jolla devices, sfdroid will not help with this too, just the perks of having tens of millions of devs with your OS in their pocket, being able to run more linux software than 'proper' linux device). Seen javispedro with a surface pro running gentoo during fosdem 2015, who would've thought that proper mobile linux device would be delivered by MS. /rant
 

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