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Comment by Elv13 | Hacker News Reader

Not really. Maemo/N900 and OpenMoko existed and worked well enough. The problem I think is more than Meego/Mer/Moblin was supposed to be equally open, but a customer ready version of that idea. It was delayed over and over again. By the time it existed, it was no longer a pure X11 based Linux distribution and more of an (too) early take on Wayland. It was also so late Microsoft made a powergrab and managed to kill it. Ubuntu mobile (and to some extent BlackBerry10/WebOS) then came and tried to take that crown, but by that time iOS and Android were too entrenched. Ubuntu mobile was also MIR/LibHybris, you can't really build your own DE/WM on it since its a monolith. So the FLOSS community waited/wasted 6 years waiting for some building blocks (and the hardware to go with them) to be ready and were left with nothing. By that time the ship had sailed and the world depended on "apps" to interact with everything and FLOSS can't challenge it.

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I had a N900 and was very fond of it, but it was really a prototype. Part done before its time, part a type of system that wouldn't have worked for normal people long term.

The N900 was more or less a tiny computer running Debian. With 256MB RAM, and swapping on flash.

It was way too low spec to run reliably like that, you quickly ran into swap death. And it had none of the niceties of Android's memory management, having apps designed to be stopped as needed.

Security-wise it was also bad, it was just a normal Linux box, so banking apps would be a terrible idea.

If it didn't get killed, I wonder how would they have polished it up for public consumption.

But it had some features that modern phones lack sorely. E.g. incremental reboot-free (or reboot-only-on-kernel-updates) updates ala Debian, such that patching wasn't a big deal or a 1GB download twice a week.

And it had a Keyboard! With really real keys!

Those are a pretty bad idea as well, and you see some distros like Fedora move away from them by introducing a reboot/update/reboot cycle.

Yes, on Linux you can replace binaries and libraries in use, but then you're not actually running the new code until you restart the program and are still vulnerable to any security issue that it fixed.

And with things like runtime loading of plugins that now may be incompatible, and programs not expecting stuff changing underneath, online updates can be troublesome.

The online model works well enough for a command line usage where applications are transient, or a server usage where you remember to restart a service or two. But for a desktop user with long lived, huge apps like a browser it's not that good of an idea anymore.

checkrestart does everything you need. And browsers like firefox display a helpful "restart me" button.

checkrestart doesn't tell you to reboot after a microcode/kernel update, or restart a Python program after a module gets an update. needrestart is a better alternative to that.

> Not really. Maemo/N900 and OpenMoko existed and worked well enough.

I am aware of them - a friend worked on the N900 - but they were so far off 'phones' I didn't bother.

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