Maemo is dead to me
After playing safe for a few months with my N900 I decided to be a bit more adventures and enable the testing and development software repositories. From experience that can be hard lesson if done carelessly on a desktop computer, but I hoped it would not be that disastrous on a mobile device. I was lucky it did not wreck havoc on my system. All it did was to give me more software to choose from and more regular updates. If my memory serves me right, I had at least one update a week on the few applications and games I have installed.
That has changed. Now I only get a really mundane update very blue moon. Only had a few updates since Nokia announced they would not use Meego after all on all of their major devices. Instead they said they would (maybe) release one more device with Meego, the N900 successor. Maemo and Meego is left for dead.
I have been told that Meego has potential. Sure, I am not disputing that. From what I have seen, I would love to run Meego on my N900, but iOS and Android has already a much larger user base than Meego can ever dream about. Meego seems to become one of those niche products. One of those Operating Systems that you can only hope one of the big applications will be released on or ported by a 3rd party — or forked out of desperation. Sounds familiar? Pretty much Mac for a few years ago and how it is still for Linux users.
My biggest concern is that it almost seems like developers are abandoning Maemo. Which in turn will make my N900 into an expensive brick. This is not a concern I have with my two Eee PCs. If Asus and Fedora instantly closed shop tomorrow I would only have to download a new Linux distribution if I wanted new updates. No modifications needed. Just download the iso image, burn it on a CD and install. Unfortunately with most mobile gadgets this is not the case. Of course, there might be a few that still use those nice Psion pocket computers, but probably not many. Usually when a company closes shop completely or drops a product, that usually is the end of it. Time to move on and stop being nostalgic. OS/2 and BeOS had potential too, but looking back that is not always enough to keep your head above water.
