I was also quite late to the party - I hadn't heard of the n900, or the n9, or Jolla until just over a year ago when I started looking into Linux phones.

The neo900 seemed like it would be perfect (high degree of freedom and a nice hardware keyboard!) but eventually I got bored of waiting and picked up a n900 to use in the meantime to get a feel for Maemo. While it clearly still meets the needs of many people, I found that there is quite a high barrier to entry - you need to know quite a lot of workarounds to do simple things, and I had the misfortune of joining the gang just as the repositories were being shut down etc. And it really is painfully slow for some things like web browsing!

I had initially been put off by Sailfish because of the closed source components, especially after reading about and seeing first hand some of the ballaches in maintaining Maemo that are a direct result of the closed components depending on old libraries etc.*

After the cost of the neo900 almost doubled, I swallowed my uneasiness about the closed parts in Sailfish and ordered a Jolla phone, thinking TOHKBD would mean I still got a usable hardware keyboard (unfortunately the keys are so stiff they were giving me a lot of joint pain in my thumbs, so I'm not actually using it any more). At the time I also considered the n9, but was put off by no HWKBD and a few mentions I had seen of HW components dying.

Since then I have come to love Sailfish. The software updates have been great, and the UI is very smooth. It's a shame the hardware is mediocre, I think it would be much easier to sell Sailfish if the Jolla phone had been something that looked like an n9 but with more RAM and updated processor.

I'm still tempted to get an n9, because it's such a good looking piece of hardware.

The obvious question is, have you tried running Sailfish on the n9?



* I actually think this is one of the biggest mistakes Jolla made with Sailfish - those closed components represent a huge risk for potential developers who might have invested the time to make complicated applications (email and XMPP clients come to mind) but didn't because the future of Jolla is so uncertain and all that effort could be wasted if there is no way for the community to maintain Sailfish if the company disappeared.

I've also heard people say that the closed components only matter to a small proportion of users, but what they don't seem to acknowledge is that those people are the potential developers! There's a significant overlap between the people with the Qt experience necessary for writing Sailfish apps and free/open source advocates who would balk at the closed components (think about the people using Plasma Desktop on Linux, all the people who have been through pain with Maemo/Meego). And then the same people go on to say that the real problem is the lack of apps!