SailfishOS has been one of my all-time favorite projects, and I’d love to see a port on the L5’s LTS kernel much like with this project. What’s stopping someone from doing this?
I guess the interest in porting something half closed isn’t that high, keeping in mind that PureOS is completely free.
4 Likes
We are very unlikely to ever see a Sailfish OS port for the Librem 5 because Sailfish OS is based on libhybris and using Android drivers, whereas PureOS/Phosh is based on Linux drivers. The i.MX 8M Quad supports Android and probably all the other components in the Librem 5 have Android drivers, but it would be a huge amount of work for Jolla to pull together all the drivers and configure everything to work on their own.
UBports has spent the last two years changing its code to allow Ubuntu Touch to use Linux drivers, but I doubt that Jolla will make a similar change to its code, so I don’t think there is any way to use Sailfish OS on top of the L5 kernel. I don’t know that much about Sailfish OS, so it is woth asking on a Sailfish OS forum if it is possible.
SailfishOS was developed without libhybris by using Nokia N9, currently Sailfish work fast and good on Pinephone Tux mainline.
1 Like
For me SailfishOS was the best mobile OS ever in my experience (comparing with WinMo, Android, iOS) but their development approach like HDK/PSDK, Silica, fork-everything-mainline-nothing approach - keeping them in the walled garden and made me finally stop developing for it.
It sill remains for me as an example of well designed mobile UI, but nowadays I would still prefer investing into something like posh/gnome based environment with a higher target to reach similar user experience one day.
2 Likes
Sailfish has a nice mobile interface.
But Purism SPC HKS also is making an awesome work on Posh and L5.
2 Likes
There are builds that are build on top of other kernels (I know on the PinePhone) not sure if there is libhybris there…
I checked the Sailfish OS documentation, and I see that I was wrong. Sailfish OS can work on either Linux drivers or libhybris+Android. See: https://sailfishos.org/wiki/Architecture
I still think it is very unlikely that Jolla will do a Librem 5 port. Most people who buy a phone that can run on 100% free software, aren’t going to then install an OS with the non-free Silica interface. Only 6% of PinePhone users say that Silica is their favorite interface, so Sailfish OS isn’t having much success on the PinePhone, and I bet that it would do even worse on the Librem 5.
3 Likes
Another reason silica won’t get much success on L5 (and pp perhaps) because it deals pretty bad with convergence. One of the main reasons of jolla tab fiasco afaik came from the fact the guys needed to port silica to become tablet friendly, and it burned much more resources than anticipated. But even that made it just adjustable to two modes, would never cope with variety of external screens elegantly.