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Posts: 915 | Thanked: 3,209 times | Joined on Jan 2011 @ Germany
#180
Originally Posted by kinggo View Post
the problem is that likeminded community does not exist in the long run.
I was under the impression we're in such a community as we write these posts.

Originally Posted by kinggo View Post
In my 10+ years of linux on desktop I've seen enough of great ideas that soon became abandonware. On the other hand apps that still exist and are updated from time to time do that with a snails pace. Most of them are still stuck on GTK2 with no wayland in sight. DE moves on with their own apps but most of the SW outside of that stack does not.
I've seen the same things but while I agree, that it would be nice if some things moved faster, personally I don't see a problem in the slow development pace.
That's part of the reason why I use Debian and maybe it has to do with the fact that I work as a developer/maintainer for software that is older than myself at its core. Plus, I don't really want what we usually call a "smartphone". I don't care for Whatsapp, Facebook and all that "social media" stuff. I want a FLOSS pocket computer that gives me a decent terminal to ssh into my company's systems, replaces my phone and occasionlly allows me to browse the web.

Originally Posted by kinggo View Post
And on mobile things are 901275437x more difficiult.
Serious SW development takes time and needs money. Blobs free HW without usefull SW is still useless.
True. But you have to keep in mind that FLOSS devs usually don't develop things they aren't interested in, because they aren't compensated for that waste of their life time. So if you want them to waste their precious time you need to pay them for it.
Developing smartphone apps for an open platform that doesn't exist is a waste of time.

Originally Posted by kinggo View Post
But it's linux mantra. Choice. With not much to choose from.
I don't agree with you on that in case of desktop SW (and maybe we will soon have this choice on mobile devices once there is an actually open platform available).
On the desktop there's a plethora of DEs with different UI concepts to chose from and for most of the tasks you could accomplish on a FLOSS desktop you have multiple alternatives of software to chose from.
Of course there are also scenarios that can't be done on a FLOSS desktop at all which are possible on proprietary desktops, but the same is true vice versa.


Originally Posted by gerbick View Post
I thought for once, a big enough company - at that time the biggest in handheld communication devices figured out that FOSS, community and devices all could be a part of their offerings. I mean, imagine that. A huge company that finally "got it".

Nokia was the solution.
Well, I only joined the Nokia community one year after the N900 release, so I can't really say anything about Symbian or the early days.
But for me it was clear from the start that while Fremantle might have been revolutionarily open for a mobile os, it was a huge disappointment in that regard if measured by desktop software's standards. If viewed from an advanced Debian user's POV, Fremantle is and has always been misconfigured beyond hope. It's the very definition of dependeny hell.
I still consider it the best phone but the worst computer I've ever used. So it was clear to me right from the start, that while Nokia might have been the most successful failure, it was not the solution. And the reason was, that Nokia did not "get it", because considering what amount of work they surely put in Maemo anyway, it would have been comparatively easy to design it in a way that would have worked in the long run. In that case we'd still complain about the slow CPU and the tiny RAM in 2017, but we wouldn't be complaining about outdated software because we'd be running plain upstream current Debian, like we do on any old x86 computer.
 

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