Sailfish OS event in Lausanne (2022-10-22)
A quick recap of the first Swiss SFOS event
Genesis
If you follow this blog, you surely remember that we had 2 Sailfish OS meetups in France already (see this link and this link).
During the 2nd meetup, Patrick, who is a very active member of the Sailfish OS community (both on the Forum and the Telegram channels) joined us from Switzerland, and liked it a lot.
As we were discussing where the next meetup should be, we said "why not Switzerland, since our Telegram channel is 'Sailfish OS Francophonie', so it is clearly not limited to France".
From then on, Patrick took the lead in organising the event: he is involved in a hackerspace in Lausanne (FIXME), so this was an obvious choice for the location.
We settled on the date of October 22nd afternoon for this event, and Patrick managed to have 2 very nice speakers:
- Ruben, a very active Sailfish OS developer, who is also a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium,
- and Andrew Branson, a Jolla sailsor (Middleware Engineer).
Interestingly, even though the event was in the French speaking part of Switzerland, the talks were in English, which is great since the event was broadcasted live on Twitch, and is now available on YouTube if you want to catch up :) (links at the bottom of this article)
The Event
Pre-event Lunch
I arrived a bit early in Lausanne, so we had lunch with Patrick, Lucien and Patrice, in a very nice restaurant nearby:
A nice way to kick things off, of course talking about Sailfish OS - and also good to finally meet Lucien, who's been super involved in the SFOS community, but I never met him before and he couldn't make it to the last SFOS French meetup.
The location
The event took place at the "HACKME" hackerspace in Lausanne:
Patrick is a member of the hackerspace, so he managed to convince a bunch of folks to attend, and also other friends from Geneve.
A hackerspace means you have some very geeky stuff lying around, like this awesome TRON arcade terminal:
Goodies and old friends
Andrew brought some Jolla/SFOS goodies (stickers, pens, ...) and I brought some SFOS t-shirts, as well as pens and badges.
Andrew brought some SFOS devices (XA2, 10, 10 II) but also a Nokia N950, a Nokia N900, and... what should have been the very first Sailfish OS device, aka "LEO":
For those of you who remember Jolla's early days, this device was never released, as there were issues with components, and Jolla had to find a solution at the last minute, eventually bringing the Jolla One, along with its TOH (The Other Half) - I don't think we should regret anything, as the Jolla 1 looks a lot better than the LEO (even though I couldn't test it, since it wouldn't charge - but the look and feel was very different from the Jolla 1).
Ruben's talk
Ruben's talk was about "Signal and Sailfish OS", and he covered Signal's approach to privacy, how he picked up the Whisperfish project a few years ago: - initially, the project was called SailSecure, and was written in Go and QML, - Ruben started rewriting it in C++, but this was complex, - so he eventually switched to Rust.
Whisperfish is still considered as beta, as many things don't work, and things
can break easily, when Signal changes stuff on their side.
Ruben recommends having a primary client (e.g. an Android app on SFOS), and
using Whisperfish as secondary device.
Andrew's talk
Andrew then took the stage to make a high-level introduction about Sailfish OS, from its Maemo/Meego legacy, the first Jolla device, the (failed) Jolla tablet, and more recently the Sailfish X program.
He also briefly covered how privacy matters for Jolla / Sailfish OS.
Post-event
After the event, Patrick, Ruben, Patrice, Lucien and I went to a burger place to have dinner, and then Patrick took us for a quick tour of Lausanne in the evening, which was really nice.
Wrap Up
A very good event, with a lot more people than the 2 French ones we had before: there were between 15 to 20 people,
Tags: SailfishOS