UPDATE: according to MeeGo developers MeeGo is going to be a new independent distribution
which uses the RPM format for packages but which is incompatible to Fedora or OpenSUSE,
i.e. there is no upstream distribution from which one could simply install addon software from.
see http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/mee...ry/000147.html

Maemo has been similar to outdated versions of Debian. Additionally, the /opt problem makes
it more difficult to port current Debian packages to Maemo.
The current discussion on MeeGo-dev is about whether MeeGo should be based on a popular upstream distribution
or whether all third-party software should be ported from scratch.
According to Quim Gil Harmattan ("Maemo6") will use apt/dpkg but be a fully MeeGo implementation.
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The decision to switch completely to a Fedora/RPM based distribution is IMHO a very bad idea,
especially for ARM based devices.

Debian/Ubuntu has officially supported ARM ports of the distribution for years,
while Fedora, on which MeeGo and Moblin are based, is still struggling http://arm.koji.fedoraproject.org/pa..._be_fixed.html
and not officially supporting it.
Moblin has nothing to lose from the merger, but Maemo will lose access to relatively
easy ARM ports of Debian software (cf. Jebba etch port) and the Debian standards Maemo users and developers are used to.

The package format themselves may not be very different, but the infrastructure
and the available software differs a lot, i.e. you cannot simply install a package from one distribution on another one.
Maemo, Debian and Ubuntu are LSB compliant and can install rpm packages using alien
but LSB does NOT require the whole distribution to be based on RPM or Fedora!

Another problem for N900 owners is that a seemless upgrade from Maemo5 to MeeGo is very unlikely.

What do you think?