There's SailfishOS. It still uses Android kernel+drivers, but above that it's a "real" GNU/Linux system (glibc, systemd, bash, Qt, connman+ofono, zypp/packagekit, Gecko). It's not completely FOSS, but it is usable as a daily driver, and has been for at least 10 years (based on personal experience).
>Spectrum is garbage and ZX81 is even more garbage... especially when considering that Commodore 64 was only slightly more expensive.
Jack Tramiel (owner of Commodore) was hugely influenced by what Sinclair was doing (really cheap computers). It definitely influenced the VIC20. You can't underestimate how widespread their influence is/was. Source: Commodore: A Company on the Edge.
Sort of like the Velvet Underground quip about only 20 people seeing the band live at one point, but every single one of the viewers starting their own band as a result.
Appreciate the effort the article author put in, but I'll be contrarian here (in the hopes of saving people time) and say that I think this is the wrong approach to take to getting hired (the effort:hire ratio is terrible).
I don't know why, whether it's to be fair or avoid litigation, but in most companies I've worked for or interviewed with, the senior engineers, hiring managers, HR, etc. don't have as much influence over the hiring process as you think. You'll probably still need to go through 5 stages of interviews, including a white-boarding or a take home test. Otherwise you wouldn't have all these "rockstar" programmers on Twitter complaining about the interview process. The best that these "influencers" can do for you, is to tip you off to an opening and maybe help towards the end of the interview process.
The other issue is, how do you know you're betting on the right horse? e.g. is the person that you're getting cozy with really going to help you career? You only have so much time and "connections" to invest.
My advice: instead of going to meet ups, take more interviews and improve your interviewing skills. Instead of spending 2-5 hours/week going to meet ups, take 1 interview instead. Even with no preperation, you'll start to see the pattern in the types of questions people ask. Improve on your answers. Interview again.
The problem the author of the article is writing about is being so shy that you'll never be able to benefit from "practise" interviews. You should really consider whether or not you understand the problem before you attempt to solve it.
This is a big problem with hiring. So many people think hiring is a simple problem that has a simple solution, but you're dealing with humans. There's so much variety in the way people think and act that there won't be a generalized solution. For some, networking outside of interviews so you can get a recommendation is a valid approach.
I think you're confusing what works in theory vs the current state of affairs. At many companies if you speak of "you're dealing with humans" and "way people think and act" in a hiring process you're automatically inviting interpretations that can be used to justify the reason you didn't hire someone was because of discrimination. Simple as that.
If you really want to see change in the world stop preaching truth to believers, but instead root cause the problem and find solutions that address them. In this case, legislation.
What you're saying is definitely true for the more mature companies (say, 1000+ employees).
I curious if the author has experience with this working for startups and their ilk, which may not have become large enough to have a proper recruiting division.
The challenge networking potentially solves is getting a recruiter to pay attention to your resume, but from that point on your resume has to be impressive looking enough to get you to the interview room. And unfortunately I know (and helped) a lot of engineers who've done impressive work but didn't know how to put that on paper effectively.
I’ve hired at multiple smaller startups, and the rule has always been that if someone gets referred by an existing member of staff then the referrer isn’t involved in the interview process beyond being a high confidence reference check.
Networking gets you to be exposed to opportunities at those companies, maybe some tips to prepare for something specific for that company. But it is not going to take away hard work that needs to be done.
Agreed. The advice in the article would work if it was about anything, but getting a job. The skills mentioned could be immensely helpful in building a network of people ("allies"?) for the purpose of getting customers for your startup, meeting other founders and even meeting angels and VCs to fund raise.
Please don't use it to get a job. There are objective criteria that companies would like to think they're using to hire the most qualified candidate (reality is probably very different). That's the best way to assure you don't hire non-performers and avoid the huge liability associated with choosing an arbitrary hiring process in many states.
Even at a big company, having someone pushing for you internally makes a difference. Probably not much on the hiring process, but pushing bureaucracy, ensuring a recruiter / coordinator looks at your CV and schedules your interviewers sooner, and so on.
I actually think it's more useful for a different reason: finding out who's doing interesting stuff, knowing where it's worthwhile applying.
SailfishOS is officially supported on a number of different Sony mobiles (e.g. X, XA2 range, 10 and 10 II ranges). All these devices continue to receive updates.
SailfishOS is not completely FLOSS, but it's real Linux, and it's polished enough to be a daily driver (I've been using it for 7 years).
I daily drove an N9 when it was current hardware, and it was reasonably good. Harmattan was buggy as hell, but it held promise.
However, I found it extremely disappointing that they didn't cater to the FOSS community by making it easy to reproduce and iterate on the OS. If Nokia with the N9 took an approach to the OS and community akin to what Pine64 has been doing with the Pinephone, we would be in a very different place today with Linux phones.
Pine64 doesn't do any software, so the comparison is apples to oranges :-)
The software from the N9 became what today is SailfishOS (mostly FOSS, but UI closed), and for something fully FOSS, Nemo is also derived from Harmattan, https://nemomobile.net/
> Pine64 doesn't do any software, so the comparison is apples to oranges :-)
True, but Pine64 facilitates the FOSS community in spades when it comes to shipping a hardware profile with mainline support, and ensuring it's trivial for Pinephone users to run alternative operating systems down to the boot loader.
I'm a developer and the N9 was completely opaque, it would have required spending significant time just to even begin figuring out how to replace the OS.
I'm now into my third year with Sailfish as my daily driver (Sony Xperia XA2 Plus) and can confirm it's first rate. And if you need an app that doesn't have a native Sailfish version, it'll almost certainly run the Android equivalent.
Wow it looks great, I had no idea it existed in a usable state. I though it was just the bones of Meego, I used Moblin on an N800, it was great sat the tine, it looks like a truly functional experience.
Wow, very sad. I remember listening to Accordion[1] for the first time and thinking it sounded like no hiphop I'd heard before (no chorus, really unconventional song structure, dense lyrics, an accordion providing the hook). That was the gateway to the rest of DOOM's discography for me.
In my opinion the shift from desktop to mobile across the wider industry took the wind out of Gnome's sails (and desktops in general, no matter the platform). It feels like there's been very little (visible) progress made on any desktop in the last 10 years.
The problem is Gnome seemed to look at mobile and "pre-sabotage" itself. Both Gnome 3 and Unbuntu Unity wound-up creating "tablet/mobile ready" shells when no one was going to be using them that way. Tablets only seemed to be the wave of the future because they were new and everyone was buying them. It only became evident later that laptops were going stick around for a while and be what most people still used if they were doing "real work".
But with the narrative being "this is the future", they were more or less pressured into it. The designers as well as programmers are volunteers and I would imagine designers want to work on the "cutting edge" even if that cutting edge is a complete disaster for users (just Microsoft's redesigned UI was).
Their target wasn't just tablets, but any device with a touchscreen and/or a small screen. As a Netbook user, I loved Unity and was excited about the Gnome 3 shell. It seemed like the logical progression of Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.
I owned one of the later models of the Asus EeePC and let me tell you, Gnome 3 ran like a old dog on it. Totally unusable. I don't know how you could use it. The processor was awful, the screen resolution tiny, while Gnome was a CPU hog and wasted screen space the eeepc simply didn't have with spacial bloat of interfaces evidently designed to be fat fingered on touch screens the eeepc didn't have.
That, plus the shift to SAAS apps so that everything runs in a web browser. Basically, the two things I have open most of the time are Firefox and a bunch of terminal windows.
I think the shift to web apps and repackaged web apps happened largely because of how insanely hard it is to roll a decent multiplatform app between mac, windows and the various linux platforms even before considering mobile. For example, the OGL backend for GTK3 has been broken on MacOS for years and while there's been a rewrite for GTK4, porting from 3 to 4 is non trivial and so is maintaining 3+4 so GG if you're a small project.
True enough, but Gnome has the advantage of being the basis of Phosh + being able to share applications with it, as per on Pinephone and Librem 5.
It works as a converged desktop too. Windows can't do that, OSX is only just getting there. It is impressive that an open source project is so ready for it, really.
The problem with GNOME as the basis of Phosh is that little work has been done to optimize GNOME for low-memory, low-CPU-power environments. The Pinephone has limited memory (especially the first board with only 2GB of RAM) and an ancient, low-end processor, and while it will run all this GNOME stuff, it does so only at a snail’s pace. On the Pinephone takes several seconds just to open the wi-fi settings to activate or deactivate wi-fi, for example, something that most mobile-phone users today expect to be a near-instant thing, because on Android it is just a quick swipe and tap.
I’m not talking about the Phosh executable as much as all the other things that Phosh on Mobian is meant to provide an interface with: so much of those preinstalled applications and libs in Mobian are derived from the GNOME project, and they just haven’t been optimized enough to run well on the PinePhone’s hardware.
Oh I see, misunderstood you there. Yeah, many apps are basically just the desktop version with some pre-configured scaling to make them barely usable - but as far as I know it is only by necessity until the mobile friendlier alternative emerges.
But while it is good to see the advances mobile linux GUIs make, they are still far from usable as a primary device :/
A simple one, that perhaps doesn't scale (unless you open multiple gyms) is to provide a boxing/MMA/BJJ gym with good coaches.
It's so cliche, but giving teens a physical outlet, where they can begin to understand that consistency leads to results, can sweat together, socialise and build comradery and true confidence will go a long way.
It's simple, and you might only be helping a few teens a year, but it's a good start. I've seen it transform some troubled kids (and grown ups) over the years (drug addicts, and extreme anti-social cases).
There's SailfishOS. It still uses Android kernel+drivers, but above that it's a "real" GNU/Linux system (glibc, systemd, bash, Qt, connman+ofono, zypp/packagekit, Gecko). It's not completely FOSS, but it is usable as a daily driver, and has been for at least 10 years (based on personal experience).