14 DAY TRIAL // The Jolla community has put together an application called Jolla Communicator that allows users to send and receive messages on Ubuntu, which connected to a Sailfish OS-powered smartphone.
Jolla is doing the same thing that Canonical is trying, and that is to penetrate the mobile market dominated by Google, Apple, and Microsoft (just a little bit). It's difficult work, and both companies are just making their mark, but it's happening. They both use the Linux kernel (for the most part) for their operating systems, and they have the same approach, meaning that they try to do things very differently from everyone else.
The Jolla and Linux community overlap a great deal, so the fact that the Jolla fans put together an application that can be installed in Ubuntu in order to communicate with a Sailfish OS is not really all that surprising. On the other hand, we should see the same thing happening in reverse, but that's not happening too soon.
Jolla Communicator works only in Ubuntu for now
It's not clear why the developers of this application chose Ubuntu for this task, but it probably has something to do with the fact that it's the most used operating system out. It doesn't mean that other distros won't be supported in the future, but for now only Ubuntu is supported.
"What if we use GNU/Linux? We’ve been trough hard times, poor support and so on. But now things are a-changing. Yes, because Jolla and their Sailfish OS are the new big guys in the city and with the growing interest of the FLOSS community, we may be at the beginning of a new, community-driven ecosystem. Unlike similar solutions, it doesn’t require any app to be installed on the phone, but it’s a PC client (compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 and higher) that lets you read and write messages on the phone," is noted on jollausers.com.
As it stands right now, it's possible to connect to the phone via cable or Wi-Fi, and read and send messages. It's not much, but there is a lot of room to grow, and the Jolla users have made the first steps towards something truly exciting.