Hi guys, sorry for the provocative-capturing title, i just wanted to share an alternative opinion about comparison between the two OSes, named above. Maybe You will think it's just another voice in the chorus, but i guess it could be interesting since i followed the opposite way that almost of you did. As i said somewhere here, i have tried sailfish without having never tried Meego before. Then after an year, i decided to try meego, for having an opposite/specular but interesting way to compare them. I admit that i was really curious, since i read here a lot of positive review/opinions of meego:

i have to say that i am not trying to flaming or making noise, just want to heard what are your considerations about it.


not being too much long, this is what has been my first impression about ui:

- meego has got few more buttons than sailfish (for example to come back from some sub menu) and i think this is a disadvantage, at least for me.
- multitasking experience has been really improved by jolla with sailfish, indeed there is possible to interact with cover of apps (even if buttons,instead of swipes, really suck). About this i have to add that for me having all open apps in homeview and not in a separate screen is an improvement.
- meego has got really better icons, they look very good and the amoled screen of n9, gives a perfect contrast between icons and black background.
- swype to lock, lockscreen, browser are better on sailfish, apart for absurd lacking of copy paste.
- email client is better on meego
- keyboard is better on sailfish as look, but the lacking of swype keyboard method is a big missing feature.
- for my little experience sailfish on jolla seems to run smoothly than meego on n9, but maybe is for the better cpu.

so that's my opinion about it, what do you think?
in what meego is go much better, apart for being open (wich is important point, i agree). for me they have less or more the same very beautiful user experience.

the only thing that makes n9 with meego the real winner is the phone itself, for its beautiful Amoled screen...wich is so far better than the jolla''s one.

I think you're comparing only the user experience and not the technology behind the two - all but the AMOLED screen mentions. And that was just a very wise decision on Nokia to include that.

MeeGo and Sailfish are both very efficient in how they handle applications, memory and it shows because both were on mediocre hardware for the time (mid-tier hardware if I were being more honest than snarky) and both did quite well in regards to their performance in perceived speed against their higher spec'd competition.

Between the two, I'd say that multi-tasking is better in Sailfish due to embedded actions on the apps, but similar enough to MeeGo to acknowledge the similarity. Swipe UI in Harmattan is improved in quite a few ways in Sailfish, but there's a few times when Sailfish is a bit cumbersome still. That alone would be the reason why I'd give the edge to Harmattan - I accidentally swipe an app into multi-tasking mode in Sailfish more than I did with Harmattan.

But in the end, think of it this way. MeeGo was only on one device, it never had to scale whereas Sailfish did get released on two devices and scaled from a phone to a tablet.

To me, the edge goes to Sailfish for that. At least they produced two devices - now, delivery of that second device to folks in the second/latter waves is another discussion.

That's my opinion in a thread about opinions...

Also you can run Sailfish to some degree on other devices, I do not recall Harmattan or Freemantle ports to other devices.

Crap, I knew I forgot something. This too!

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!