Oh yeah, as far as maemo.org, I wish you could browse a list of everything. I hate only seeing 5 top selections with no option to see the lower ones.

I like the way SourceForge does it, even garage.maemo.org lets you get at way more apps than maemo.org does.

Yep, along with "Upgradable" and "Installed" (a-la-aptitude/dselect)...(*)
I really like Debian dselect/aptitude's ability to "forget-new" !
Packages stay under "New" for as long as *I* want them to.

(*) We could then have multiple package installs/uninstalls from a single tree-list.

Do you really understand what Red Pill does? Personally, I don't really want to see all the hundreds of library packages outside of User/ everytime I want to install a new application. :\

A quick reminder: maemo.org was not able to cope with the number of downloads requests of os2008. It is a single point of failure. I don't want it to be a central repository as longas that problem is not addressed.

This isn't entirely the case. There was a DoS attack going on at the time, which greatly reduced its load capacity.

That's why you have mirrors of the repository. Besides, distributed akamai caching has already been set up since November.

This problem is ancient, and has been solved many years ago in various ways for different distros. It's really a matter of personal taste, which one you prefer, but they pretty much all work better/simpler than the current maemo implementation.

Since ITOS is based on Debian it seems that it should be fairly easy to simply adopt apt-get/synaptic as well as Debians packaging practices. I have never used a distro with better package handling, and it seems absurd that a derivative like ITOS manages to mess that up.

As for the issues related to the difficulty of getting into Extras, I don't understand the problem. There is nothing stopping the community from making a joined effort to have just one coherent repository seperate from the Nokia ones. If this was managed with as much (self)discipline as the Debian repositories, people needed only add the one community repository and have all the apps available. This, in essence, is the reason I voted 'I have a better idea' - even though I can't really call it my own.

This problem can be solved by the community without much creativity, and with almost guaranteed success, by simply cloning the debian approach. This also means that every package needs a trusted package maintainer that people can go to with bugs/issues etc.

That's really not much better than having a plethora of independent ones. Extras comes installed by default—a very important point for Joe User. Just take a look at the ballpark numbers on tablet sales (~500,000) and compare that to the readership of ITT. Setting up a big community repo doesn't solve anything on the large scale. Getting Extras up to snuff opens up the wide world of maemo software for everybody.

For a linux newb user - i think the "essentials" is a great idea, also good summary is really crucial.

I don't even use the app manager because i don't understand what 90% of the apps do.

I just do searches on ITT, which is really frustrating because then you get apps that aren't compatible (threads from 2006) or apps that are only in garage mode.

Until the packagers get their heads in order, it's called 'google'.

Yes, red pill does way too much all in one fell swoop. You illustrated it here. What other distro uses categories in this way? Why not have some kind of category of "support libraries"?

What does "User/" really mean? "Safe/" ?