Gimp is there: http://repository.handhelds.org/fris...l/main/g/gimp/

Lots of reasons: The Ubuntu Mobile Edition (uses Hildon, will be shipping on MIDs soon), Nokia's sponsorship of this port (so, presumably they'll make the proprietary hw bits work), Ubuntu's every-six-months release cycle, version 8.04 receiving security updates until 2011 ...

Of course, the Debian armel port is very interesting too, and some maemo stuff is being packaged in Debian now... but their armel distribution is of their next version, lenny, which may or may not be released before the end of this year (officially, no release date has been set). It is possible to use Debian armel on an NIT right now (in a chroot, or by booting it), but obviously companies aren't going to ship something that expects their users to track the testing or unstable versions of Debian (where there are frequent changes and sometimes things get broken).

I expect that both Ubuntu and Debian (lenny) will eventually become good OSes for use on the tablet. As I said before, I hope that Nokia's official OS fades away into a mere set of packages that are installed on top of Ubuntu proper. If it could be installed on other distros too, that would be even better.

But what I'd really like, besides access to the thousands of packages in these distros, is security updates from people who take it more seriously than Nokia does.

Nokia does not even bother with security updates.

Is this a bad thing? I dunno... Here's a random example from Debian's security page: DSA-1537-1 xpdf -- several vulnerabilities. This describes three different bugs which each allow "execution of arbitrary code" by PDF files, which means that every PDF you load can technically do *anything* to your system. What version of xpdf does Nokia ship? Inside of osso-pdf-viewer_1.4.41-0.tar.gz you'll find they're using version 3.0.0, released in January 2004. I guess Nokia just assumes nobody would ever load PDFs from untrusted sources on their tablets... or that security of always-on internet devices with cameras and microphones just isn't that important?