Wednesday, November 15, 2017

SF OS X

Android. That's the operating system which most probably runs on your mobile phone.
While this is the very common system to have nowadays, it's matured enough throughout the years and built very rich ecosystem of applications, there are a few things which I don't like on it.

The basic idea is, that if you buy something, you should own it. You should be able to disassemble it and modify it, to adjust it to your needs and most noticeably: you should be in full control of your device.


Unfortunately this is not possible with some systems, including android. You might get the feeling that you can customize the system (yes you can change the theme, background and other stuff), but the reality is different.

This was exactly my case! I had enough of applications updating by itself, without notifying me (I speaking about you play store...) or auto-magically logging me in (right hangouts?) despite I never actually logged in before. Those are the things you cannot control, those are the things which someone else can control instead of you, without your consent.

I wanted to try something different. That's why I bought Firefox Flame with Firefox OS and because I thought it could be the next "android" I gave it a try. It had complete different ideology, it was basically a browser-based system in your phone - genius! Well hold on to this thought, maybe in the future something like this might come back again. Moving on to proper OS...

I watched Jolla for a couple of years with their Sailfish OS. I liked it, it was one cool, little different system, controlled by gestures. But when you look up more closely, there is one huge advantage - with Sailfish OS, you get a Linux system running on your phone.
That's it! You run the system and you own the system, meaning you can just login as root and you have the control over it.

You can add repositories to install applications; you can use package manager from terminal; you can setup cron jobs; configure daemons and services, restart them, stop them; you can run multiple applications simultaneously (I'm talking about real multitasking!); and when you stop an app, it won't start by itself.
This is what I imagine an OS should look like. You can do all this amazing stuff, but you don't have to. It's up what you do with your system, with your phone.

You are in charge!

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