[MehdiEG]

As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced, have always been the underdog and have always deeply suffered from the political turmoil happening above their head while they were at Nokia.

One thing they have never been however is vaporware. They have always delivered. And what they've delivered, particularly with Meego, was superb. Meego was especially impressive given that in the last few months before its release, they had for all intent and purpose already been fired from Nokia. That they managed to pull together, keep working on it and release something of that caliber when they knew that Meego had no future at Nokia is pretty incredible.

It's obvious that Jolla is extremely unlikely to ever go mainstream. But that's not the point. They're clearly a team of talented, passionate and persistent hackers that can create products that manage to be delightful to use, open source and very hackable. That's why I find the lack of interest from the HN community, which is usually all over these type of projects, to be surprising.

[lambda]

So, you're right, it hasn't been entirely vaporware. The N800, N900 and N9 did ship, and were pretty impressive.

But when the N900 shipped with Maemo, they then announced that they were changing a large portion of the stack, from GTK to Qt, from dpkg to rpm, from Maemo to MeeGo. So the software stack was pretty much obsolete as soon as it shipped. Then the N9 was released after Nokia had cancelled development on MeeGo, so it was pretty unclear if the platform had any future at all.

Now it's been two more years, and I've heard a lot about Tizen and Mer and Sailfish and Plasma Active and so on, but I haven't actually seen any hardware running them that's generally available.

So yeah, it's pretty impressive what they've done with the resources they have, but I really don't want to invest time and money into a platform that's going to disappear or be reinvented in another year.

[dandrews]

The Maemo-MeeGo transition didn't simply replace technical innards; it completely disrupted the Maemo user community, which relationship was negligently bungled by Nokia management. (Although it may also have been due to Intel's influence via the Moblin contingent.) Weep for maemo.org, which once upon a time was the best friend Nokia ever had.

[Zigurd]

> As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced

Compared with Tizen, FirefoxOS, or Ubuntu Touch, Jolla probably has a bigger and more experienced team.

Tizen has been career Siberia at Samsung, despite all the noise about how Samsung "wants to not depend on Android." Samsung even more wants all the money Android makes for them and are timid about pissing off Google. Samsung and Intel don't communicate well. Until Samsung finally killed their Symbian products (IIRC) about a year ago, more people were working on Symbian at Samsung than on Tizen. Why does Intel need a handset Linux of their own? Answer: they don't, and one day the CEO will notice.

Ubuntu Touch, like many initiatives at Ubuntu, seems tentative. The way Canonical tried to crowdfund a device makes it seem like they have no launch partners.

Firefox OS has a solid team behind it, but they are also dogmatic about it being a Web operating system. They would turn up their noses at having Android compatibility. What if the sweet spot for Web operating systems is Chromebooks? It was tried on handsets once already and failed.