Very late, but promising [LWN.net]

Very late, but promising

Posted Aug 25, 2011 9:09 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
Parent article: LinuxCon: MeeGo architecture update

I think getting devices out is not as important as getting the software stack right. Linux,Qt,Wayland,systemd,smack etc seem to be the right choices.
My hope is that once Qt5 and Wayland work there will be a few devices(2012, maybe Intel will even have competitive SOCs by then). The smartphone market is going to be so big that smaller vendors can easily survive by offering phones that put the user in control and offer a lot of freedom. The UI should be Swipe-UI inspired. Was the handset UI for Meego mentioned at the Mini-summit? Any Intel people here to comment?

I would be willing to spend $400 to 500 for such a phone, which leaves a nice profit margin for any vendor.

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apps, but...

Posted Aug 28, 2011 0:43 UTC (Sun) by skierpage (guest, #70911) [Link]

The Meego platform is a Linux distribution with underlying technologies like X11, OpenGL, and GStreamer; the platform toolkit is Qt and Qt Mobility APIs but some device flavors also support GTK and Clutter. So yes, "native linux apps are possible". You can even install the Meego SDK on a Linux PC and cross-compile to Meego, and/or use the build service. Back in the Maemo days hackers would blog about porting programs to their device, but that seems to have died down, maybe the WeTab will encourage it. http://apps-beta.meego.com/applications has e.g. Audacity, but it isn't (yet?) the equivalent of packages.ubuntu.com.

Meego has the triple crown of easy ports: lots of Linux apps, newfangled QML/Qt apps, and the ever-increasing power of HTML5 apps. (Maybe even Android apps if the Myriad Alien Dalvik ships for Meego.) But similar benefits didn't exactly make millions run out and buy Nokia N810s & N900s. Also, many Linux applications are not just GTK or Qt, they tie into Gnome Shell/KDE libs/Plasma, Zeitgeist/Nepomuk, etc. Meanwhile the appeal of a device is no longer the sum of its hardware, software, and available applications; it also depends on the quality of its "cloud" connections to app store, profile and data sync, location services, etc.

(Disclaimer: I know nothing.)

Promising, but never delivering

Posted Aug 28, 2011 23:02 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

My thoughts exactly. Why spend so much time protecting users' data when there are no users and no data to protect? Why rewrite most core components when there are only a few discontinued devices out there? It sounds crazy. Perhaps they should have better built a new framework, rather than rework Maemo completely; it wasn't so great to begin with (although I liked my N770, I have to recognize its time was short).

My first thought was to imagine what android devs must think when reading this report, and how hard they must laugh. Get something out the door, now! Meego does not sound compelling even now, so imagine in a few years time. As a litmus test: how many cool KDE apps do you miss on your android phone?

Promising, but never delivering

Posted Aug 29, 2011 14:44 UTC (Mon) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]

It seems like you're repeating all of the "if it's not big now, it never will be" memery that people also said to put down Android during its first three years or so. That wasn't entirely prescient.

Nate

Promising, but never delivering

Posted Aug 29, 2011 22:55 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

To be honest I wasn't trying to be prescient. In fact you have misinterpreted my comment, and no wonder because it was a mess. Android browsing tends to disorganize the best minds, so imagine what could happen to mine.

Anyway, the intended meaning was even less original: it was basically "if there is no apparent need for your product and no one is asking for it, then don't bother building it". The same could not be said about Android in 2007, by any stretch: there was a measurable need for an open, hackable phone with a wealth of mobile applications. Just look at the competition at that point: closed iPhones, weird Symbians, annoying Windows Phones, botched Neo 1973, even phone-less N800s.

Android does very well in many respects: open, open source, popular, well done, likable and easy to program for. Perhaps it is in the hackable axis where it fares worse, but the OpenMoko project has shown that market for hackable devices per se is (sadly) not near commercial sustainability. At this point a new platform should be more open than Android and more attractive than iPhone to be viable, and I don't think that a consortium without mobile phone manufacturers can do that.

Having said that, perhaps there is a market for tablets, set top boxes and in-vehicle infotainment where Meego can shine. Perhaps the unnecessary retooling and reworking of most internals was really necessary, and in a few years they will get there. Perhaps it will even be Free software after all. I wish them best luck, but I could hardly care less.