I was 49% joking. I was mostly responding to these two sentences:

It sucks and you're happy? I don't know anything about Wayfinder, but these two sentences kind of make it sound like snake oil, or maybe a rip-off. My n800 and n810, which I gladly paid for, make me feel like the thief. So, maybe instead of discouraging these companies, I would rather encourage them not to suck. Or else...

For the record, I think that thread has been around for the year and a half I've been here, and it always made me feel uncomfortable. But after today I feel less so.

pb - To be clear to everyone, you are talking about "hacking" the supplied soft/firmware or the device to use unsupported distributions like the 2007 "Hackers Edition" that allowed N800 software to run the 770.. and not breaking into other computers or cracking software for personal gain or general mayhem; aren't you?

I don't have the feeling that many people have the experience you describe. I think that having the special Developer's repositories avoids a lot of the potential problems. And the coders seem to be very responsible about warning us non-hackers that we may be about to screw up our Tablets with their betas and alphas. (Request to coders: when you discover a problem with your app/hack, could you edit the Post #1 of the thread, maybe in red, to highlight the danger? E.g., Advanced Backlight should have had such a Warning as it precludes updating maemo OS2008 from earlier releases to 43-7.)

One problem with starting a hackers' forum, is that there is a continuum from hackers to newbies. I see myself in-between, albeit much closer to the newbie side since I don't code. I'm willing to screw around, and I've read enough here that I have a better-than-most understanding of the Tablets. I fear that if there were an isolated hackers' forum I would lose out on my window into the hacker side of things.

I'll give you an example. I watched Bundyo's development of tear for quite a while, but I knew I wasn't ready to install it. Eventually, nobodysbusiness posted a how-to on installation, and the thread comments made tear seem useful and stable enough. Now I'm sort of a junior beta tester, trying to give Bundyo useful feedback when I can. Where would the crossover be when tear development discussion would move from the Hacker forum to the maemo.org forum?

Something I try to do is relieve some of the forum heavyweights from the burden of answering the questions that are below their abilities. There are other forum participants, such as bunanson, who perform this function most generously. In this way, the forum is like a tribal village, where the older children take care of the infants and the adults train the older children in the more sophisticated aspects of the culture.

So, from the point of view of an older child here, I'd rather not see the fragmentation. OTOH, if the elders think they really need a place to be alone without interference from the kids, who am I to say otherwise?

(If anything, maybe there should be a website for Newcomers, not a website for Hackers. Such a forum could be sort of certified as safe for those who really want to stick with just the tried-and-true.)

I was kinda joking to if you notice my next post http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=34 I started joking a lot. Yeah it sucks that it sucks but I really blame the gps hardware for that not the software once I get a lock it will take me where ever I want to go, but now we are really getting off topic lol

Well um a yeah

I mean a place where software support for my KDE version can hang out.

One of the reasons I say this, is because I do not follow maemo / debian standards. I don't care what libs are available, IF my KDE needs them they are included in the tarbal

I need a deb file to download a 300MB tarball and extract it. Well its not really meant to do that, so its a hack.

I am proposing that there be a place for hacked software and OS and other things, separate from the supported forums.

This said, I realize there are lots of software out there who are not following proper standards.

So I think it should be clear to an end user, go to this forum and you should be ok to install what you find. Go to this forum, and there may be some pains involved Same concept as alternatives, but more of a separate forum to make things more clear.

That will be the Maemo Users' Site that Nokia is building. It will be to that site that Nokia's documentation and on-device links direct new users for help and additional downloads. maemo.org is for those who want to step beyond the basics and get involved as active members of the community.

PB lets just saying within the next 1 month to 12 months you will have what you want. Just give us time, I'm not sure of when or how but this will be fixed. I'll bet my tablet on it.

Most end users don't go to forums.

I think one of the problems that happened with the move to talk.maemo.org was reorganizing the forums. I realize that the goal of removing subforums was to make it simpler, and less confusing, but I think this made everything harder to follow.

I shouldn't have to read through a 20 page thread just to figure out some small problem I'm having with Mer. Tablet Hacker would create what we had before: more forums. This, to me, seems better than less forums. There should be more forums and more threads to split up issues, to make things easier to find, IMO.

However, I know that's not going to happen here. I think what I said in my first post was too harsh. I have nothing wrong with talk.maemo.org. I just think that, every now and then, it's OK to split things up a little bit, and that's not happening here.

Yeah, that was a funny exchange. I'm still laughing.

Okay, to reel it in: Yes, we need a separate hacker forum. tablethacker.com will be the black hats, talk.maemo.org will be the red hats and noobs.maemo.org will be the white hats. You can have all three hats, but your sub-handle has to be the same for all three forums, you can only wear one hat at a time, and you can only change hats every four hours. So, everybody get going 'cause black-daperl is already conjuring his first "you're an idiot" post.