The areas that generate the most excitement these days for the zaurus community seem to be Debian and Ubuntu and hopefully one day Mer. The fact that some users are still finding utility in their Zaurii to this day is a testament to the resourcefulness of a handful of users and the excellent hardware Sharp brought to the table.

The zaurus was never intended as a general purpose machine after Sharp abandoned the US market early. The main focus for Sharp was sophisticated dictionaries which required sophisticated hardware at the time. All the cool clamshell Zaurii had to be imported from Japan.

I agree the Zaurus community fragmented and some of the core leaders in the community seem to have abandoned it or moved on.

The derivative of Sharp's original OS is stuck at QT embedded 2.x based and a 2.4 kernel. Some great software was written for that platform, including some decent commercial software. A lesson here is to not rely on proprietary or special purpose tool kits. While Hildon may be great, I think the real power of something like Mer is to be able to apt-get a large amount of software from the ubuntu arm repositories. There is lots of software I use that isn't available under or been ported to Maemo.

Some of the other Zaurus distros went by the wayside when the giants who brought them forth moved on. That's a lesson for the maemo community. Giants and luminaries are great, but when they go, the mere mortals suffer.

Angstrom provides features which have enabled Debian and Ubuntu to run on the Zaurus and allows multibooting with different kernels. But an end-user distribution was not something the developers seemed to care much for. Sometimes I wonder if the developers actively discouraged the end users from being involved. Another lesson for the maemo community, actively embrace your users.

I guess another lesson from the Zaurus is that while a commercial sponsor is great, when the company decides to move on it is the users and opensource developer community that will need to carry on. Nokia will one day abandon the platform, and it will be up to community to continue to innovate and find uses for their beloved devices.

Anyway, enough rambling for now .... What's the record for most posts in a thread BTW?