I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.
I have two Nokia N9's (running Meego) at home still. I used N9 as my daily driver until about 3 years ago. The failure of that magnificent OS, combined with the failure of the successor (Jolla / Sailfish) still annoys me.
I would still use my N9 except that there are apps that I use every day that simply don't exist for Meego.
I suppose I should try to sell it to some one who can use it but it is such a beautiful thing that I am loath to get rid of it even though I haven't even switched it on for ages.
Sailfish is still around and is still getting upgrades every quarter with new features and improvements. Android support is actually pretty good and I use it for my daily driver.
It's not a success but it hasn't been a failure IMO.
I used an Xperia X with Sailfish until end of 2019 but then I finally dropped it - it mostly worked but got too much annoyed by small bugs that never got fixed 100% (but in the meanwhile the UI got a lot of changes => that would definitely not be my way of prioritizing work). It's a pity but personally I think Sailfish will die.
I still have both N9 and Jolla. I really loved my N9 and was excited about Sailfish, but as soon as I got my Jolla it was clear to me that it'll be a dead end. I did use it for a couple of weeks, but it absolutely missed the mark on why N9 was so loved.
I understand that you can't just straight up copy the functional and beautiful UI from N9, but Sailfish the Sailfish UI was just way too experimental and bare.
Internal politics. Symbian faction was too strong and Maemo was (rightly) seen as something that would cannibalize it if successful.
Meego being a full rewrite and repackage (qt/rpm whereas maemo was gtk/deb), although it had merits, means development needed to restart from scratch.
Nokia also totally mismanaged dev relations. First it built up dev excitement for Maemo, then announced it was going to be abandoned (for Meego) a few months later.
Meego was a combination of Intel's Moblin (purchased from OpenedHand, a big Linux shop back in the day) and Nokia's Maemo.
Shortly after Intel abandoned the project in favor of Tizen, leaving Nokia holding the bag. Nokia went through the motions until the infamous burning platform memo, driving the last nail.
In some ways, N900/N9 is a parallel with Amiga. Great machine, tremendous excitement by a (small) loyal userbase, mismanaged by development, and now a subject of nostalgia and failed attempts to resurrect the dream.
This is anhistorical; Nokia abandoned the Meego project with/after the burning platform memo. The Linux Foundation abandoned the Meego project and adopted Tizen afterwards, in part because of Nokia's departure
There is Tizen and some other derivative I can't remember still actively developed. I would by a Tizen phone if I could be sure there are enough of good apps available for it and if I didn't trust Samsung even less than I trust Google.
Tizen is a derivative in name only. Samsung effectively took complete control of the group from all the other companies on the Meego project and it seems like they only continued work to keep pressure on Google.
Nokia owned Qt and Samsung didn't want to pay fees or buy Qt outright, so they went with the mostly unknown Linux Enlightenment project (didn't hurt that it's main dev worked for them at the time). Likewise, Nokia owned rights to SwipeUI, so they opted for a remake of the Android UI.
If they'd gone with something like a cleanroom implementation of SwipeUI or webOS, I think Tizen could have been a success. Instead, it just feels like a bad, outdated edition of Android. If users wanted that, they'd just use Android instead.
i had a tizen phone. tizen was not bad. but the selection in the app market wasn't to great. f-droid has more/better apps than tizen.
unfortunately, unlike sailfish, tizen lacks support for android apps. the reason for that is that samsung would loose its commercial android license if they added android support to tizen.
Was Maemo open source, including the shell? I wonder whether anyone will try and revive it now we have mainline kernel Linux phones, like Librem and Pinephone.
It wasn't fully open source, but mostly. It was merged with Intel's Moblin into MeeGo. Once Nokia stopped working on that, MeeGo was forked into the fully open source Mer. Mer is nowadays used by Jolla as a basis for Sailfish OS (which again has non-open source parts at the top of the stack).
I _think_ it mostly was, with the exception of binary driver blobs. At least a few years ago it still had very active dev community at maemo.org, so it is not inconceivable for it to be revived. Alas, the neo900 project died.
Friends of mine were taught by Carsten Haitzler (rasterman, original author of enlightenment, lead dev of tizen) at UNSW. Back in the day enlightenment was, in many ways, miles ahead of the competition. Unfortunately it was miles ahead of the hardware as well.
Apparently he has always been passionate about open source, and I've always been impressed by his output. I'd love to see /e/ get some mind share on a decent platform.
I still use mine. Got a suspicious cheap battery + charger several years ago when the usb broke again. Shipped from china it took 2 months by boat, and the other battery is now extended enough that you can't close the back lid, but dammit, great phone.
Why are you still using the N900? Its kernel, browser and SSL libraries haven't been upgraded in years and years now. If you connect to a network, you are just asking to be pwned.
I kept my N900 for years longer than most people because it has a quality DAC and, as long as I kept it in airplane mode, it was a good music player for the classical and jazz I listen to on high-quality headphones when traveling. But eventually I realized that the N900 could be totally replaced by simply adding a Bluetooth DAC to the Android smartphone I already have (and I'm glad I did that, because the BTR3-FiiO Bluetooth amp I got sounds even better than the N900).
I recently got a Pinephone, but it’s hard to enthuse about it. So much of the cool things you could go with the N900 – Emacs and the whole OS it brings along, writing your own scripts in the terminal – were due to its hardware keyboard. A modern smartphone that lacks a hardware keyboard is just a pain to hack.
First, it works and do the job of being a phone and it has a great keyboard for sms.
It also lack a bunch of anti-features. No calling the mothership. No advertisements. No constant attempts to get me to register, to send gps information, to get me to do things which I don't want to do but the manufacturer do.
Interface is clean, fast enough, intuitive to use. It has the few apps I want to use like the terminal, fosdem schedule and also a virtual debian machine. All the third-party stuffs still get regular updates.
In the future I don't know what will replace it. The free software phones are interesting but I have my doubts about how practical they will be. On the proprietary side there are the foldables, but it is still a touch keyboard. There are feature phones, but many seems to now days be smartphones in disguise.
> All the third-party stuffs still get regular updates.
OK, but I hope you are aware that even the third-party stuff still uses the 2.6-version kernel and the system SSL libraries, which have not received security updates for years.
Also, an Android phone running LineageOS would not call the mothership, advertise to you, nag you to register (there is nothing to register for), send GPS information anywhere once you configure it to not do so (or you can choose a libre alternative like Mozilla’s location services), or get you to do things which you don't want to do but the manufacturer does. That is why many if not most idealistic N900 owners moved on to LineageOS, while hoping that something like the Neo900 or the Librem 5 or the Pinephone would eventually remove the need for Android entirely.
