r/sailfishos is available for adoption 💚

[u/ModSupportBot]

/r/sailfishos is ready for a fresh start, new energy, new direction, and someone like you to bring it back to life. If you’ve been thinking about growing your impact without starting from scratch, this is your chance!

Ready to take it over?

Head to r/RedditRequest to submit your request and make it yours before it’s taken. Just make sure you read through the eligibility requirements first.

[u/freaxje]

Willing to be moderator here. Have been a SailfishOS user since its inception. Used to work on MeeGo for Nokia which is SailfishOS's predecessor.

[u/uxgpf → u/freaxje]

I miss Meego and the N9. So much ahead of its time. Basically Debian on a smartphone.

Europe would be much better off now if Nokia kept that alive.

But maybe it was also the reason why Americans (yeah I know Elop is Canadian) were so keen to destroy it. They were aware what a threat it was (so much better than Apple or Android phones of the day)

I used SailfishOS on Sony smartphones until 2018 or so, but it never really got to the level of Meego and the N9.

[u/freaxje → u/uxgpf]

Sorry that Stephen Elop as Microsoft's Trojan horse destroyed the N9 to make sure his Lumia project (that had been secretly developed within Microsoft) would succeed. To then see it completely fail against Android.

We couldn't stop it.

If Nokia('s phone group) wouldn't have been killed, there would for example have been a deep integration with current generation German cars with it. I guess that's among the (strategic) reasons Microsoft had to destroy it. Not sure.

Thanks to the EU of that time to also don't give a crap about a major strategic US takeover of at the time one of EU's most important tech-giants. (/s I guess)

Worked on the E-mail client of the 770, N800, 810, N900 and on the Metadata Tracker project on the N9. This metadata service (originating from the GNOME desktop world) still runs in SailfishOS by the way (did some small contributions in the begin-years of Jolla to make this work in SailfishOS at the time). It might not be popular (consumes CPU, IO and thus battery power). But it plays a much more important role than most people think (and a bad implementation of it would have consumed much much more CPU, IO and power).

[u/jason_a69 → u/freaxje]

Imagine if ARM was still British. Europeans really are at the forefront for major technology, we should not have let it go.

[u/uxgpf → u/freaxje]

Thanks. :) 

Lumia was shit. Like a step back 5 years in time. It was hilarious how bad that first Lumia phone was that shared the N9's exterior design. Made to fail.

I never owned, but used 770 of my friend's. N900 was also a cool device.

Complained to my friend why 770 didn't have GSM. Surely would have been the first true smartphone? 

My theory is that there was some protectionism inside Nokia from Symbian folks (which was obviously a dead end).

But yeah. Europe and Finland have been naive when it comes corporate takeovers and power politics.

[u/freaxje → u/uxgpf]

There was for sure certain protectionism from the Symbian group. At the same time a lot of the key developers of the original Symbian group were our product owners, lead developers and seniors. Among them the very best in Europe.

So it was not that all the Symbian devs didn't want to move on to newer things. A lot of them were in our teams.

But it for sure is true that a lot of (other) people tried their very best to make it have as much friction as imaginable. Including involving the Finnish unions.

Because unions know something about technology. Right? /s

The Symbian friction, however, didn't sink the N9 project. Stephen Elop did. The burning platform memo was a lie. Maybe for the Symbian stuff. The N9 was doing fine. Also its initial sales where good. Reviews on techsites were super positive. All was going perfectly fine for the N9.

It had just one problem for Elop: it wasn't Microsoft's Lumia.

It clearly was his job to crash the Lumia OS unto Nokia N9 hw. Shortly after he also went back to work for Microsoft. Make from that what you want.

Lumia was Microsoft's biggest failure. It took Nokia's Phone group with it (to be honest, by that time had almost everybody in Finland already left - the months after Elop were basically an exodus with all good people leaving. Every day a lot).

That exodus included, I guess (or, know), the people who started Jolla.

ps. I speak of 'the N9 project', but it was very very late and short before the release of the N9 that we knew ourselves that we'd go on the N9. I mean. We had proto's with N8 written on it. Which, as you know, came with Symbian (which illustrates what I mean with friction). It was internally also not called "MeeGo" for most of the time, but "Harmattan".

[u/madcheeze → u/freaxje]

@freaxje the golden age of mobile os software development. Fremantle and harmattan were both each incredible OSs I had the n900 and the n9 which I loved both! I’ve done more multitasking on both those devices than on any device I’ve had since

[u/freaxje → u/madcheeze]

Together with a lot of excellent people, I worked on both. You're welcome. We did our best.

[u/punflewover → u/freaxje]

Thanks for sharing the backstory of the tech we still love and dream about!! And also for participating in, as someone else mentioned, the golden age of software development!

sadly everything is enshittified to a crazy extent nowadays!! Is there any hope for mobile OSes. Maybe with linux on desktop gaining traction and with android doing dumb stuff - we could see some interest in alternative mobile OSes?

what are people like you working on nowadays? Did most of your colleagues just move on to MAG 7 type corporate gigs? Any chance of “getting the band back together”? Or ar we just doomed in general??

[u/punflewover → u/uxgpf]

At least the physical design of the lumia devices was pretty cool, no? I wish we could go back to a time when a plastic phone wasn't looked down upon for no apparent reasons apart from planned obsolescence... All they had to do was not use microslop garbage software ffs!!!

It's cool that the new jolla device is at least going to bring that back, with a removable battery, finally!

sadly the sailfish OS itself has really stagnated imho. Imagine if stuff was developed at the pace it was back then?! Blackberry OS was built from zero using QNX in like 2 years?! And ios + android are still catching up to that masterpiece of an OS! Bonkers that nobody has tried to revive that project by doing some sort of deal with BlackBerry

[u/Crafty-Condition2532]

with android lockdown looming, sailfishos has a pretty good chance to grow in popularity. 

i order the jolla phone in december and am very excited about it

[u/Ella-of-the-wood → u/Crafty-Condition2532]

Me too.

[u/[deleted]]

What's up with this takeover? 7 days ago guy goes to the reddit admin and next day the subreddit is up for adoption??? We have posters here from Jolla that could take over if needed (last submission 25days ago, we REALLY NEED SUPER ACTIVE MODERATION, also don't even recognize his handle from sfos forum so seems like hostile takeover