I must say that, while still needs some polishing, Sailfish OS (which is not 100% free, but is quite there, and provides a complete Linux experience), does the job. My Pebble works, my BT car kit works, and I have all apps I need. In fact, my biggest complain is about the hardware, being underpowered and with an atrocious camera. An official port from Jolla to some mid level device would make me _very_ happy.
In some countries, like mine, the FOSS mobile OS killer has a name: WhatsApp. Without official support for FFOS or Ubuntu Touch, and being very aggressive against third party apps (banning their users), most people can't even think of them as an option for daily usage.
Jolla goes around this bundling a commercial Android Dalvik emulator. Not the best solution, but one quite pragmatic.
Does it make sense to go the N900 route now? Anyone has any experience on this? Some worthy successors like Pyra and Neo900 are coming out, and N900 can be still found easily to use while waiting for these newcomers. How good is Maemo these days?
An obvious alternative is to get a Nexus and install CopperheadOS + FDroid. The ecosystem is very polished and lively, plus hardware is very good albeit with planned obsolescence due to the lack of long-term kernel updates.
Also; the Mer wiki mentions an Android compatibility layer and you manage an Android emulator; would either or both not solve the Whatsapp issue?
Pretty much yes. With developer mode on you gain access to a terminal with bash and other expected utils. There is a mobile terminal application with custom keyboard which is more or less usable, you can also ssh into the phone without any problem. As for the package manager there is pkcon (probably some alternatives are also available), you can install build utils without any problem.
I've been using Jolla for some time before moving to iOS. It was a very cool experience. I really liked having a phone that I could hack and mess around with. The gesture based UI was nice, it was amazingly comfortable after getting used to it. The main drawback was the lack of apps and the reliability of the phone. The Android apps work poorly, they are sluggish and plenty of apps are not going to work due to lack of Google Play Services. Also with Android apps you get the old flawed Android permission model. The phone crashes from time to time, sometimes in the least suitable moment (stability varies between updates).
I guess the major impediments I see are getting an LTE baseband at a decent price point, and providing Signal Private Messenger and other apps that you can get on iOS & Android, as we have seen, developers won't go for a 3rd development target (Windows Phone).
Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic.
Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live without any mobile games - srsly, get a handheld or build one yourself[1] - and I don't use many other services I couldn't find alternatives for.
I want a dialer command that can be used with pipes and stdio.
I want to consume "signal strength" with AT+CSQ from a command that I can pipe into things.
I want to see nearby towers in a 'top' like interface that shows me what the local carrier environment looks like. I want to enable and disable airplane mode with a command.
It would seem like you could do this with android, but I don't think you can ...
The rest of what you want needs a bit of coding but should be possible to do, just need to interface with the RIL.
I want to control the phone with unix. I want to perform telephony functions with the command line.
I want to place calls with a command line. I want to redirect stdio into an SMS. I want to query provider/signal/encryption/service with sysctls.
And so on ...
I don't think many unix cellular telephony tools exist, do they ?
When Android came out I installed it, but wasn't a fan. Been with Qtopia ever since.
I've since been given an N900, but it doesn't boot. Looking forward to the Neo900 (I'm scared to install a GTA04 board myself :P ).
While I cannot attest to daydream, I have happily been building a custom version of Android from source for years without Google Apps or other closed source applications. Everything I need is either part of Android, on Fdroid.org or Github.
History repeating. I loved Firefox OS, now Windows Mobile and I think Microsoft is not far away from releasing it "to the community". I don't want to live in a world without choice.
