linuxmemes

I can't talk for Jolla. What I do know is that they have opened up meaningful parts in recent times. Even the one major remaining closed part, the UI, had important parts open sourced recently, with open sourcing of Lipstick.

I don't think they will open source everything in the near future but possibly the qt environment might be on the list to come. If that were to happen the only essential part remaining would really be the home screen I think. So it is really that, are you purist and consider that a knock-out criterion or do you also have no problem with using closed source components with desktop Linux distributions?

I did get the new Jolla Phone as a daily driver and for my use case I even manage to use it fully natively and it does what I need it for. It does have some smaller bugs and some rought edges but it doesn't feel like a prototype. I don't have experience with other alternative systems but if I look at the postmarket wiki and they don't list a single phone that is not meaningfully compromised in key functions, then I don't think that it is the same as Sailfish OS on the new Jolla Phone.

partially closed source

I can't think of a single scenario where this isn't a red flag

If there's even one proprietary BLOB inserted into your open-source OS, you no longer have an open-source OS. Pity, I really really liked the SailfishOS look&feel when I tried it briefly in 2015ish.

I'm in batch 2, so I guess I'll be waiting for a while still.

Yes thats pretty much the closest you can get to fully open source today. I have a number of devices I use:

• A Pixel 5 with Graphene because the modern world relies to much on Android Apps, also used as hotspot,
• A Nokia N9 for reading and light browsing, occasional navigation
• A Nokia N900 with Maemo Leste for secure administrative work.

We also have Sailfish devices in the house

It may be a private phone, but you don’t really know whats going on under those proprietary blobs.

Yes thats not good, but also a problem of many common Linux distributions. If you have any linux-firmware-* packages installed on your system, they also contain similar binary blobs for the firmware. E.g. Intel or Qualcom wireless cards. But you can utilize all tools up to strace under Sailfish OS, to see what those drivers are accessing and check that they don't do anything bad. Under Graphene OS, you can not do this. (But its resonable to trust the very privacy focused developer that they have checked and tested this and isolated them as far as possible on the OS level)

Sailfish OS is the definition of proprietary software. You need to buy a subscription if you even want to install it on third party devices.

Again this is not correct. If what you claim is true, how comes that the OS is available on all these devices?. Sailfish OS is open Source at its core and easily ported to new devices. What you can do is pay for the licensed content on official devices. That enables automatic updates and proprietary software as the MS Exchange support and the Android App Support. Though for the later you can also install Waydroid because, you know, its Linux! Paying Jolla however gives access to a more comfortable solution and support development of the platform.

It’s like Windows

Um... no. Can you port Windows to a new device? No, its source is closed. Does Microsoft support people hacking their OS? No, Jolla has community meetings for that. Do you have full Access udner Windows? No. Does Sailfish send your data to a third party? No. Does Sailfish show you adds? No, Does it force you to use AI? No and so on and so forth.

Please don't hate on the one European company trying to do things right. Support them in making things better.

You are so wrong about many things that it seems like you have some personal anger towards it and just don't care about having a fact based based opinion. It all reads like a fanboy of something else just blurting out shit they've heard without even trying to find out if it's correct.

You also need a license to use Redhat Linux

So does Graphene.

Both ship: Firmware, the HAL components (which are way more critical in my eyes as they have low level hardware access and could hide anything from the OS) Example for these are: The Camera Stack, the Audio Stack, under Graphene the Widevine DRM components.

Sailfish can run without these, e.g. on the Pinephone. Graphene OS can't Graphene additionally comes with an eSIM binary, which is disabled by default Sailfish comes with proprietary UI components, a choice the company made because of their limited manpower as it allowed them to provide features where currently no open source solution exists or existed at the time of implementation) examples are swipe gestures for the keyboard, MS Exchange support, Android App support. That not great, but far from a closed source system where everything is closed source. There exist many patches for UI components because they are partly open source.

The OS ist still Linux, that is true. It is even LInux+GNU which Android is not. It is Linux with closed source components, thats true too.

But not everything works. One user is regularly posting updates (I think in !linuxphones@lemmy.ca) about getting all devices of their FP to work. They are making progress but it's still tedious work and if they ever lose interest or something happens to them it can be years until someone capable can pick up the torch.

Its pretty abysmal in the way of hardware security, and software. The gOS team did a deep dive on alternative devices to the pixel. Only device even close to the pixel was Samsung, but well... Samsung hates their consumers it seems and refuses to open their devices.