7 ms·

Does Sailfish OS get updates regularly?

• mpol 6y ago
  Yes, every few months. Communication is not always that clear, the same with the roadmap :) Early in the life of Sailfish it was decided that being behind on upstream software versions was not a problem, since in embedded software things are different then with desktop and server. In the past few years many work has been done to amend this situation. There are some other factors in play. It is a small company which is short on developers and keeping the system Gecko browser updated has proven to not be very easy. Then there is the issue that some software is closed source, which works fine with Qt 5.6 which is LGPL, but with newer Qt versions it is either full GPL or full commercial. This is a business decision and developers don't have much say in this. What I suspect is happening now is that it gets postponed untill it can no longer be postponed, which does save money :) Then there is the issue that untill now Sailfish was tied to Android drivers and thus is using Android kernels. In that sense the Pinephone is an interesting development with mainlined drivers. So yes, in the community there are some complaints, but in the real world I can understand it the situation from both sides. For my practical usecase, a daily driver with whatsapp, I haven't seen a better linux phone yet. Again, I am really happy with my phone, even though the situation makes it easy to be critical towards it :) edit: Oh, just to add to this, updates can last a long time for a hardware iteration. The Jolla 1 from 2013 is still getting updates. Ofcourse the Android layer is not updated due to old Android drivers, but the rest of the system is just the same a the newest hardware that is being supported. I hop my Sony Xperia XA2 from 2018 will last me 5 years as well, or hopefully even longer.