Agreed, there have been too many mobile OSs lately, all proporting to be The next big thing - well, we're bored now!

Debian with mobile adaptations, aka Maemo, brought proper linux to a lot of people (not just the doctored version as found in Android, for example) - great. Furthermore, it has brought more users and power-users into the OSS domain, great again! Some of these adaptations were/are closed by Nokia before it teamed up with the Linux Foundation for Meego.

Alas, Maemo was released by a manufacturer whose idea of customer support and continued consumer experience was to sell another device and switch operating systems. And, the hardware/drivers supporting Maemo5 were of a variable quality. As a result many, who need things to "just work" have given up on it.

Meego is within the domain of the Linux Foundation and has been shelved. What ithis Tizen thing will end up with, is anybody's guess! However, I think it is pleasing to hear that those who were working on the Meego OSS handset project are returning to the Mer project.

Mer started as an OSS version of Maemo. AFAIK, it has now advanced to take in lots of bits of Meego. Whether it will return to be more Debian based or becomes its own flavour of linux for mobile devices, remains to be seen. Can one assume developing for Mer would require minimal porting efforts from Maemo?

My only problem with Mer is its name. It's fine for hackers & enthusiasts but trying to recommend it to a marketing dept of a device manufacturer might be tricky. And, IMHO that's what it'd need, in order to accomplish what Maemo has, or even on a larger scale. I suppose it's possible to give the desktop has a catchy name and ignore underlying OS name?

From where I'm sitting, the request to the LF would take Mer (i.e. OSS Maemo) under its wing a bit more, assuming the project admins would accept, for the purposes of forming/maintaining industry links etc. because mobile is the future of personal computing and linux is the best core OS for ligher systems (desktop aside), so Mer needs to be in there!