Comment by seba_dos1
2 years ago
> N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued
That was probably because N9 didn't really use MeeGo - technically it was still a Maemo based system that was only disguised under MeeGo brand.
The version of the story I was told that the Maemo/Moblin mashup was just as bad as the idea of combining two different frameworks that do essentially the same thing sounds like, nowhere near production ready, and the Harmattan aka MeeGo-branded Maemo with Qt was the only way it could be made to work at all. I haven't heard anyone say that genuine MeeGo would make things better.
That was the sentiment of my comment as well, I guess I weren't clear enough - Nokia N9 was made to work great on what technically was still Maemo, but since they were supposed to go with MeeGo afterwards it would still require a lot of work to actually do that.
Ok, I misunderstood. I thought it was clear at that point that Meego was a dead end, but Harmattan was missing things like app sandboxing and some app store and payment related features, the package management was a mess, etc.
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Can somebody explain what Maemo and MeeGo means here?
I remember the N900 coming out and wanting Maemo.
Then years later when I didn't care anymore I MeeGo peaked my interest, but I didn't really care anymore.
What other then GTK vs QT is different.
And why was it needed, I never understood why they simple didn't go forward with Maemo.
Maemo was debian-based and built around GTK. Its device target was effectively the N900. Nokia then rebuilt the interface (at fantastic dev speed, it has to be said) in QT (which had been blessed as the UI framework in order to facilitate onboarding of Symbian developers, who had been told to use Qt for new Symbian apps) and shipped it in the N9.
By then, however, management had struck an agreement with Intel to join forces over a Linux OS for devices. Intel had its own Linux distro, Moblin, which was based on RedHat. Moblin and Maemo were meant to merge into "MeeGo", a distro based on RedHat but with a QT interface. The project started fairly quickly but, by then, the N9 was basically ready, so Nokia effectively shipped what they had beforehand and just called it MeeGo.
Beyond the UI, iirc, the differences between Maemo and Moblin/MeeGo were the packaging system and some service daemons. The most annoying part, really, was that third-party apps built for Maemo would have had to be repackaged and retested for MeeGo, effectively throwing away all community efforts made over several years. Despite the best efforts by Nokia to placate folks, the community they had built around Maemo was completely pissed off and largely gave up, focusing on the actually-profitable systems. And then the burning platform memo happened.
Thanks!
This really reminds me of the Unix wars. Constantly companies announcing partnerships and then there developers spending time merging proprietary systems. And before they are ready another partnership bringing in some other thing that has to be merged. Not sure what exactly they gained with this Intel deal.
I guess they should have just continued with Maemo and attacked other software developers in general, rather then rewriting the whole stack just to attract Symbian developers.
A year after the N900 they should have been an N1000 by 2010. By the time late this memo happened the N1100 should have been ready to drop.