this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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There is a commercial phone linux: SailfishOS. IMO also the most polished one.
If those fuckers at Microsoft hadn't intervened with Nokia, we might have these things on much more devices. Meego was so promising 😔
Maemo on Nokia N900 was awesome. But even before Microsoft Nokia and Intel decided to rewrite a perfectly working phone OS from scratch and stopped development for years while trying to build Meego. At the time android didn't have multi-tasking, but on Maemo you could play a video on vlc on the background, and it kept playing while switching windows, inside the list of little windows. It used qt for ui and you could even write native looking apps in python. It had full access to the camera api, people were writing crazy scriptable camera apps for the thing, such as the frankencamera. Why would you throw away a perfectly working os and waste time trying to rewrite the exact same thing for years Nokia!? why!? it could have been an actual Linux phone revolution years ago. and no, I don't think Android is already Linux phone. fight me.
Android always had multitasking. Part of the issue with android 1 and 2 was that it didnt have any way to properly manage the task managers which lead to people installing task killers(which had utility in those days) and auto task killers(which due to how android handles caching just lead to a cycle of killing, thing popping up, killing, and etc). My g1 with a swap partition was probably my best android phone at keeping things in memory without auto killing it until I got a phone with 6gigs of ram.
Been daily driving SailfishOS for absolutely years. Originally ran it on a Nexus 4! It's by far the most polished not-Android/iOS phone OS going right now.
Is sailfish OS on a libre software license?
Yes and no. The core of the OS is opensource, but the UI is proprietary. At least last time I checked.
No. The bits that make it Sailfish, the UI, are proprietary.
Then I guess I would not put muy 5 cents there.
Depending on your tolerance for frustration you can daily a phone running SailfishX. But the reality of it, at least for me, is that you will be running mostly Android apps using the Android emulator.
The emulator and the relatively easy access to Android apps makes it the most promising for me.