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by pengaru 1660 days ago
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.
1 comments
sicelo 1660 days ago
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/

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pengaru 1660 days ago
> 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.

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