If that's what he meant, no. I was thinking of some 'unification' between the mobile os and desktop os. FYI, at least, between RT and Full, you can you use the metro apps. Just saying.


PS: NO I'm not a windows lover, nor hater. I'm always open to new products, so don't judge me.

That's why I bought the Nokia 770 - the same OS on my desktop and on the tablet! Same was true for the N900 und N9.

For the next year I will stay with the N9 as my phone.

My next phone will most likely be Ubuntu or Android.
While Jolla will most likely have a much better and polished UI than Ubuntu, I'm not convinced Jolla can get a big enough user base to create good user- and third-party-support.
While Ubuntu will most likely have a horrendous phone experience in the beginning, giving the fact that they are trying to squeeze desktop applications in a phone (very maemo style imho), Ubuntu is a very well established brand. Even if Ubuntu can't really compete from a user experience perspective at first, I think they will continue the development of Ubuntu Phone for a long time to come. I'm not convinced Jolla will have that luxury.

Tizen seems a big mess, and I don't see anyone that is willing to clean it up properly. Samsung is way to much Android oriented and I'm not convinced Samsung or Intel are even capable to fix the OS and release a good product.

Firefox OS is intended for html-only application, so that isn't an option for me.

I don't know much about KDE or plasma. But my personal experience with KDE on desktop aren't really positive and I don't know any tablet product with a 10.000+ user base that uses Plasma.

For me any linux distribution needs to have an active userbase, otherwise it is way to much work to update and support stuff myself.

It will be interesting to see how easy developers can port applications between Jolla's Sailfish and Ubuntu. Yes, it's two platforms, but then both rely upon HTML and Qt/QML as developer frameworks. As usual, it's probably all about details, but if they're reasonably compatible, Sailfish could even benefit from Ubuntus user base.

I find you remarks about the UI very interesting. While I prefer Sailfish (for other reasons), I think Ubuntu did a much better job on the UI. Sailfish ist just too restricted and simple for me. Interesting to read other opinions.

Agreed. You can really smell all those suit-and-tie guys and their corporate strategies when you see Tizen.

... as is Tizen, btw. The developer documentation mentions HTML only, no support for native third party applications.

I found that for me, the userbase (or community-support) that Nokias Maemo products enjoyed were just enough. It shouldn't be less, but it was OK. Of course I don't know the sales figures, but I guess any new GNU/Linux based phone, be it Jolla or Ubuntu, must sell as well as the N900 to be of any relevance at all. If this is true, I'd assume community support will be at least "just enough".

As written above, I'm really, really curious about Ubuntu vs. Sailfish: Will they be similar enough from a developer's perspective to actually support each other? Or will the differences be so big that "write once, run on both" is out of the question? (Which will probably mean they'll fight over a small market segmet.)

In Ubuntu I think I can really see the strings that hold up the UI. They really are squeezing a desktop UI in a phone. The notification area seems to be the Unity application indicators, the Home application seems to be the Unity Dash and the pop-up menu seems to be the global menu. For applications the Ubuntu Software center is used etc. etc.
Currently Unity has performance issues on low-end desktop hardware (netbooks), and the demo on the Nexus phone seems laggy. This all reminds me very much of Maemo, that also tried to squeeze a desktop distro and UI in a mobile device. I personally don't dislike the concept, but on Maemo it did result in performance and User Experience problems.
MeeGo-Harmattan has a lot of parts that are specifically designed for a phone, and I think that improves the general experience (if limiting the features slightly).
Sailfish seems to want to continue the MeeGo-Harmattan concept of specifically designing for mobile, while Ubuntu seems to want to use the Maemo concept. Maybe because Canonical realizes that they don't have the resources to support a second set of applications specifically designed for mobile.
I do understand most of this is speculation, and the difference between designing specifically for mobile and adapting a desktop application is in reality not that clear.

It should be very interesting to see how unified applications for tablet/phone and desktop compare to specifically tailored versions with regard to ease of use and feature sets (not just in Ubuntu, but comparing with Windows 8, iOS and Android also).

The coming hardware advances will also be very interesting. Will the faster SoC coming in 2013 offset overhead from the Desktop legacy?

Totally agree with this.

I'm very skeptical about any cross-platform promises. With Qt for Maemo/MeeGo/Symbian is wasn't really the case imho. While most of the stuff did work, and a lot of changes are minor to get stuff to work, it often did involve detailed knowledge about the other system to understand the "minor" changes.
I don't know how good the promise is with Windows 8 in crossplatform support for phone, RT and desktop. But even with those I have my doubts.
Ubuntu, Sailfish and BB10 may all share the ability to support Qt and QML, but will all Qt (mobile) components be properly supported? Even than you will probably need to make changes to make an application integrate well in a specific platform.

I dont like Ubuntu as distro, Unity is pain.

I have big hopes of Ubuntu phone. It would be nice, if existing qml harmattan apps could be ported to that.

You can still like and use the Ubuntu distribution without using (or liking) Unity. I use Linux Mint, but I still consider it a Ubuntu installation. I customize my install a lot, and I could just as easily use Ubuntu as a base instead of Mint. I would not use Mint if it wasn't Ubuntu based. I love launchpad.net and love the big Ubuntu userbase and forums.

So while I currently don't use Unity, I do think it (mostly) has improved a lot in the past year or two.

I never liked the original Gnome 2 interface Ubuntu used to have before Unity, and think Unity is an improvement over the plain gnome2 interface.
I currently mostly use Cinnamon on Mint or I use OSX, and I like stuff like the global menu and a dock. Unity has a lot of stuff I currently also use and like, I just think that there are better solutions available.

OpenSUSE is my favorite, but they're way behind the competition now.

Everything was going in their favour until Nokia destroyed The MeeGo Project by holding it back/slowing it down. Merely to just dump completely later.

Here are my thoughts about Ubuntu Phone OS, from user and developer points of view.

I've installed and tested the Ubuntu QML Toolkit on Ubuntu 12.04 desktop, its Qt Components for Ubuntu is very similar to Qt Components for MeeGo Harmattan, i.e., it will be very easy to port MeeGo Harmattan softwares to Ubuntu Phone OS

For 2013, I plan to continue developing for Maemo and MeeGo Harmattan in Python/Qt/Qt Quick, and start porting some softwares to Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Phone OS.