news
Why some tech users are ditching Android for Linux phones
SailfishOS is not a household name. It has proprietary parts but offers strong support for Android apps on official devices and recently had what the author describes as a good launch of the Jolla 2. The author praises its gesture-based navigation and calls its application framework beautiful. Because SailfishOS is built on Linux, users can SSH into the phone from a PC, either wirelessly or over USB, to troubleshoot or tinker.
The experience is far from seamless, though. The unofficial SailfishOS port for the Fairphone 4 ships with outdated versions of Python and glibc, making some tasks harder than they need to be. Waydroid, a tool for running Android apps inside Linux, is broken on the port. So is GPS. Some community-built apps are poorly coded. The author singles out a WhatsApp client they depend on as an example.