Is there actually any information about the OS?
Are there any examples of how this is different than what we already have?
Isn't Android exactly this. Linux with a touch UI.
At least from a developer's point of view there's not much Linux visible in Android.
IMHO, the Android APIs feel like Symbian rewritten in Java... I get the impression that Google has spent five years rushing to add new components to accomodate everything under the sun with no vision of how the stuff fits together, and meanwhile vendors do their own thing that is slightly incompatible with the core. Of course Symbian was worse in every respect, but the end product is worryingly similar.
It's much closer to a desktop linux distro - it still uses glibc afaik, and other more "standard" linux bits (eg pulse audio and dbus and x11 and rpm and gstreamer etc - see here for more info: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Architecture - Sailfish is based on Mer, so the architecture should be fairly similar)
Android has way more bits that have been made explicitly for it - many of which were made to BSD license-able (or so I've read) :-)
Sailfish has a Qt-based UI stack. It may also not depend on one specific application runtime environment as much as Android does.
There are also some hints that Sailfish is taking an approach similar to Ubuntu's for touch and GPU support on mobile devices and blending Wayland with Android's compositor.
In other words, Sailfish is likely to be closer to a mainstream interactive Linux OS, and a closer cousin to Ubuntu, Firefox OS, Tizen, etc. than is Android. It's different times now, and you don't have to diverge so much from the Linux mainstream to create a good touch user experience.
Most importantly, Sailfish offers real multi-tasking as we know it from desktop operating systems. While in Android or iOS your application is suspended when you switch to another one, in Sailfish they can run in the background.
"While in Android or iOS your application is suspended when you switch to another one"
That's not correct. Android has multi-processing. The Android runtime enables Service components to run in the background, and has preemptive thread scheduling, and has had these features throughout all publicly released versions of Android.
In my experience, Android multitasking still doesn't work like a desktop (or even my old n900.) Certain applications (those registered as services) can continue to work in the background, but many suspend entirely.
Sometimes I want to do something else while I wait for a large web page to load over my mobile data connection. On my n900 this worked fine, but as soon as I switch to another task, Chrome on Android 4.2.2 quits loading the page.
Plus, task switching is still a heavy operation on Android - swapping back and forth between two applications is a bulky, slow operation compared to the n900, which, itself, was bulky and slow compared to a desktop window manager.
Suspending apps in the background of iOS is a _feature_. It's not like the OS doesn't support "real multi-tasking". Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch -- most of us prefer battery life.
This is a piece of common wisdom among the Apple "slavery is freedom" crowd, and is impervious to the fact that N900s and N9s have fine battery lives. I frequently have a couple of browser windows, my media player, bash, and an SMS window open on my N900, and it isn't too tough on my battery.
The problem with battery life and multitasking on N900 is that it has so little RAM that it gets super swappy and starts to thrash esp. under heavy client-side js. I'm dying for an N900 w/2013 specs.
>Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch
This is not true. Task management has to be designed into a multitasking OS. Maemo did a beautiful job.
Have you ever used a N900 or N9? Both of these devices do offer full multi-tasking and base their software stack on the Linux kernel and glibc. The battery life of the devices is actually quite decent.
Android is completely different, everything runs inside a version of the JVM called 'Dalvik'. Linux is incidental and nothing Linux-related is accessible to apps
Android with google isn't completely open-source, and it's certainly not free as in freedom. But this is a role that Firefox OS will fix, I guess. I don't think sailfish or ubuntu are going anywhere.
B2G (ie FirefoxOS) has the same problem as Android as in they both have completely unique weird userland that has very little to do with your "normal" Linux userland, or anything else for that matter. I'm not really sure about Ubuntu phone OS, maybe it will have userland closer to their desktop variant. But on the other hand that won't help all that much as even Ubuntu desktop is veering away from what I'd consider the "standard" Linux distro.
Some people just would prefer having desktop-like OS on their phones with some mobile oriented apps, and that's what Maemo/N900 almost delivered. If Sailfish is anywhere close to that experience then I'll be a happy hacker. Admittedly commercial (mainstream) success probably requires bit more, but on the other hand I know non-linuxy people who were/are quite satisfied with their N9/N900.
Correct, I meant that FirefoxOS would be the open-source mainstream OS, not the linux mainstream OS. And I don't think that Ubuntu will be mainstream, because they don't have any partners while Mozilla have tons of partners and a schedule.
