“Originally stemming from MeeGo, birthed under Nokia’s watch, Sailfish has since gone its own way and is maturing into a mobile platform getting ready for launch. This week at the Mobile World Congress, we tracked down Jolla and Mosconi again, getting the opportunity in the process to check out a live Sailfish demo. We check out how notifications work, look at the Sailfish take on a status bar, and get to see the media player with all its gesture support.” By far the most unique and interesting of the alternative mobile platforms. Very fancy.
Nice! Two questions though.
1. Can you really SEE an Operating System? I always thought that I can can only see the interface: the Desktop Environment/ Window Manager. On a PC, I can for instance see “hey! this is a KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Unity, ….”. But I cannot see what OS is underneith. Is it Gentoo Linux? Ubuntu, Fedora? Or FreeBSD? Why are new Desktop Environments sold to us as new Operating Systems?
2. Should we call Android, Meego, Sailfish, Tizen and BB10 “mobile Linux distributions” ?
So, should Sailfish be called new Operating System or new distro with it’s own newdesktop environment…?
Edited 2013-02-28 16:41 UTC
Yes. Because outside of the XWindows world, most desktop managers are unique to the OS (Windows, Mac OS, QNX Neutrino, OS/2 etc.)
Much like languages,when does a dialect stop and a language start? I’d say – listen to the manufacturer. If they call it a “OS”, it’s an OS, if they call it a “distro”, well…
BB10 is nothing to do with LINUX also, it is based on QNX, which was its own OS long before LINUX grew to be popular.
For me, “Desktop environment” is very much an invention of the LINUX desktop. Before LINUX, I remember using SUNOS on Graphical terminals (1990’s), but there was never a big deal made about the Desktop it ran. We had “Windows managers” and that was about it really.
There is “OS” in “SailfishOS”, so it’s ok to call it operating system.
It’s a composite distro. It uses Mer (https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Main_Page) and parts of Nemo (https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo) together with Sailfish specific parts. It’s fine to call it an operating system and it is a Linux distro in more senses than Android.
Edited 2013-02-28 17:47 UTC
The GUI stuff is the only new part of the OS – and that’s what’s cool. The rest of it is the rock-solid GNU/Linux foundation we know and love. It even uses Xorg! With the right configuration, you could make it start a regular X window manager on the secondary display when the phone detects an HDMI output, and since it’s GNU/Linux it will take about ten minutes to port a desktop or terminal application. This is real convergence, not the “let’s jam Unity onto a Dalvik-less Cyanogenmod and call it Linux” crap that Ubuntu is doing.
tidux,
“you could make it start a regular X window manager on the secondary display when the phone detects an HDMI output, and since it’s GNU/Linux it will take about ten minutes to port a desktop or terminal application.”
I asked this recently elsewhere but didn’t get an answer. Do you know if the hardware that’s used in tablets actually supports a secondary HDMI display or if it can only clone the primary display?
If the device has an HDMI port then it is safe to say it can drive an HDMI display. But there are many other questions about the specific chipset, CPU/GPU, and other components before you could determine if it can drive its main display and the external display separately. I don’t think there is any generic answer to your question.
If the device has a host mode enabled USB port (many newer tablets do) then it is quite possible to run a secondary display through the USB port.
Porting desktop apps to mobile devices usually involves rewriting the interface for the form factor. Many linux desktop apps are not written in a way where the UI is cleanly separated from the backend. So porting desktop apps to mobile may be more involved than you suggest. Also, most mobile linux distributions do not come with the libraries that are usually bundled on the desktop distributions. Getting those libraries on the mobile OS may be simple or tedious depending on the library.
I do not understand this popular claim that it is simple to port desktop apps to a mobile interface and form factor.
I do not agree with your opinion about the Ubuntu mobile effort but I will not get into that now.
jayrulez,
“Porting desktop apps to mobile devices usually involves rewriting the interface for the form factor. Many linux desktop apps are not written in a way where the UI is cleanly separated from the backend. So porting desktop apps to mobile may be more involved than you suggest.”
I think tidux’es concept of “port” was just to get the desktop/console software running on a tablet connected to an HDMI monitor and not necessarily to rewrite it for the tablet form factor. In this case he’s probably right that it should be pretty trivial. The GNU toolchains might be underpowered running on a tablet, and a keyboard would be very helpful, but it should still work.
You still need the libraries, though.
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/STABLE-A…
You can of course statically link, but then your executable might turn out to be too big for most users.
I think the answers depend on what you call an operating system. Myself, I accept as an operating system any set of software which offers an interface between raw hardware, end users, and developers.
From this point of view, both the Linux kernel AND Linux distros qualify as OSs in their own right. Because one CAN operate a Linux kernel without any extra software through the standard shell if masochistic enough, whereas distros would be other OSs based on the Linux kernel.
Linux DEs taken separately, however, would not be OSs in their own right, since they require extra runtime support.
Edited 2013-02-28 23:08 UTC
Actually you really can’t do anything with just the Kernel. Sure you could have busybox, which provides a shell, but you still have GNU libraries, which is why the hardcore people always refer to distributions as GNU/Linux, because you really can’t do much with out the libraries/software outside of just the kernel. Granted Android doesn’t use the GNU part all that much, which is why Android is just a different Linux based distribution, but very dissimilar to other Linux Distributions.
For the record, I use “Just Linux” with a shell all the time, and it’s awesome.
If you were using busybox on top of the kernel then busybox would be considered the userland, ergo it would qualify as a bare-bones OS. It wouldn’t be just the kernel any longer, though.
No, there are replacements for most of these libraries. Considering your hypothetical busybox+Linux-kernel one could use e.g. uClibc instead of the standard libc, thereby avoiding the use of GNU-libraries. Using GNU is not a hard requirement for a Linux-distro.
I love how smooth and fluid it all seems, and I am fairly certain I’d quickly grow fond of how the “menu-thing” that you pull down from the edge works. Sailfish really seems so much more innovative than anything Google, Apple or Microsoft has come out with and it’s terribly refreshing!
I will definitely try to get my dirty mitts on a Sailfish – phone whenever they are released.
As an old Nokia N9 user, I don’t see much innovation there. The gesture controls in the mini windows, mainly. Other than that, quite a few things are done differently for the sake of it, like swiping vertically instead of horizontally. It’s very close to Meego Harmattan. Then again, there were plenty of good things about Harmattan.
Still, I’d like to see them succeed, and if someone manages to port Sailfish to the N9 (or the Nexus 4), I will install it. I just hope they’ve put more work into the browser than Nokia did.
May be they can help the development of embedded Gecko with Qt. It would be more interesting than another WebKit browser.
Edited 2013-02-28 23:28 UTC
Let’s be honest – if they could have continued Meego, I suspect they would have. You can’t throw people who used Meego and OS components that spun off the Meego project at a phone without it looking ever so slightly familiar.
I couldn’t agree more. Classical menu have been the sore point in mobile guis since first Symbian, and I was really disappointing IOS and Android didn’t bring anything to the table.
I was waiting eagerly for someone to finally kill it.
Bravo Jolla!
Just watched the video. Looks promising. If I were looking for an alternate mobile platform this one looks pretty good.
So according to Thom BB10 is chaotic, unfocused, and cluttered but this is fancy.
Yeah ok that really makes perfect sense.
Edited 2013-02-28 20:35 UTC
God forbid Thom have an opinion on a subjective matter.
Has Thom actually used BB10? I ask because I felt the same way about Windows Phone till I actually *used* it. Now I quite like the UI.
According to the video, Android apps will run unmodified on Sailfish. If so, this is the number 1 reason that makes me believe on Jolla’s possible success. Too bad the whole ecosystem is not very open.
Too bad they didn’t preserve binary compat with Harmattan. In some countries (where Nokia was still the emperor) there were actually a valuable commercial software projects started before Elop blew it and these effort ultimately delivered. I home somebody would find a way to bring Harmattan compatibility environment to the device.
If geeks managed to bring enough Android api to run its games on N9, that one should be doable as well.
Like OS/2 running Windows apps?
(and desktop Linux running Windows apps through Wine)
I am the only one not liking that the home screen background also seems to be the background troughout the entire OS? I quickly get tired of seeing it.
Well, I can say that it doesn’t bother me. I collect wallpapers, so it’s not difficult for me to just change it if I ever grow tired of it. That said, I can certainly understand that some people might grow tired of it faster than others and therefore it would make sense to have a setting for disabling the wallpaper in non-homescreen situations.