I have the original one pre ordered, orange cover and all. It was my first smartphone. Used it for years. Then things started to become slower (more apps using more resources / being heavier) and my needs changed (wanted better camera, more space, 5g, need to use android apps that required a higher api version) and bought my second smartphone which was an android.

So the phone really is linux, had systemd / journalctl if I’m remembering right, file system was btrfs which I had to do some maintenance by hand by ssh into it, it was using wayland. Basically 2 things were closed source: their UI and the thing that allowed to run android apps emulated.

I absolutely loved it and the ux was very nice. It took me a lot of time to get used to modern UX of android after it and it was painful to adjust.

I just did a year in update:

https://geekyschmidt.com/post/sailfishos-sept25/

They are basically what is left of Nokia’s efforts with the N900 and N9 back in the day. But they chose a semi-closed source business model which severely limited community uptake and then seemingly got overwhelmed with maintaining their software-stack so now a lot of it is very outdated; which is why they are now slowly open-sourcing it, but it is probably too little and too late.

Edit: and their mix up with some Russian business (not sure about the current status of it) also doesn’t help instill confidence.

I’ve been reading about it for about a year and talked (via the fediverse) with people who have it.

Before I even consider the hardware, a few key points about the OS (Sailfish):

• They do what they claim to do
• More insecure than Graphene OS
• Can also run Android apps (I can’t remember how well/easy)
• OS updates are paywalled (subscription)

This last point sucks real hard.