Notices

I don't know of any myself. I would use the BT keyboard for any serious text editing anyway...

OK, I'll give you that one. Still, it's a stupid way to configure a GUI editor.

If we're going to compare applications, just about anything is better than minimo.

Wait, strike that; the Application Manager is worse...

Yup. And it doesn't even have the excuse of being an incomplete port of a cross-platform desktop app (like minimo or abiword or scite) : it's supposed to be a native Hidon app :-)

OK, here's a wild thought: Given all the problems Hildonisation apparently gives people, why don't we try to cobble together a more generic Linux distro for the 770? Something like Open770, which is based on the QT libraries?

One of my other pocketables is the Archos PMA430, for which OpenPMA is being developed. Its latest version, OpenPMA 0.2, now runs almost anything that was developed for the Zaurus platform, with the added bonus of a -- marginally -- better HWR engine.

There. Now flame away...

And end up in the sorry state of platform fragmentation as with the Zaurus ?
No thanks :-)

If the vendor neglects its closed platform as Sharp did with its own variant of QTopia, you don't have a choice ; but as long as Nokia keep their open spirit towards maemo and maintain a decent dynamic in the community, I believe the best choice is to work with them to improve what needs improving in maemo, not against them by creating scores of half-baked "better" alternatives...

Why is fragmentation a bad thing?

I mean, there are quite a lot of people who see the 770 not as a webpad, but as a portable Linux workstation; I'm reasonably certain quite a few of them would appreciate a more "generic" Linux, but don't want to dish out the dosh for a Pepper Pad 3. And I'm fairly convinced that a non-trivial subsection of those would be interested in a non-graphical distro for their 770.

Don't forget that we already have fragmentation: There are several versions of the kernel available and there is the mutual incompatibility of ITOS2005 vs ITOS2006. One might say that in that last case Nokia started the fork themselves. Worse: Porting apps from 2005 to 2006 was so non-trivial that many of them are still not done.

Well, that was exactly the reasoning in the Zaurus community, at the time when the ZUG forums were ablaze with projects like Sash/Cacko, OpenZaurus, GPE/Familiar, pdaXrom, Debian, Gentoo, BSD, not to mention the more obscure (tkc, guylhem)...
They've been at it for, literally, years (I bought my Z in early 2003 when things were in full swing). And look at where they are now : nowhere. The 770 has gained more and better software in the past year, despite the ITOS2006 trauma, than I've ever seen for the Zaurus...
I don't count custom kernels and OS upgrades as fragmentation. However, I was amongst the first to say, at the time, that changing the binary format was a Bad Idea (especially as no one ever bothered to tell us mortals why it was supposed to be a Good One). And it did take a long time to regain all that we had under ITOS2005 (plus some nice new ones), but I don't think there are that many still missing, are there ?

From what I'm seeing, our 770 is getting a better and faster device on every software upgrade.
From a point of view, to have many distributions to choose from means more freedom, but on the other side we have to think that the 770 is for the moment a unique toy with unique carachteristics. It means IMHO that we really need only one distribution at this time of 770 life in order to improve its stability and performance overall. Following the MaemoDev and User lists is nice to found gems such as two days ago a bug in hildon-window.c
As far as I understood, we had the 'big drama' of going to OS2006 for speed reasons, and I think it has been weel worth the effort to re-install everything.
The device is getting every day more stable, faster and smoother, with many new apps available. Mine is a total laptop replacement for my needs:
- Xterm because you will simply need it
- python + winzig for pim apps (it doesn't allow syncro with web based progs but it's python, it means easibly hackable and - sirs - this prog is FAST LIKE HELL)
- grisbi for account management
- unison for an almost instant synchronization with my home PCs
- horizon for on-the-fly sketches (sometimes it slows down without apparent reasons, perhaps some memory leaks somewhere?)
- Mplayer & Canola for multimedia
- Gnumeric (a must have, it's incredible such an horse power in a so little space!) - I have a customized file that let me track down everything I need for my daily job while travelling: it transformed my working drama of getting back home after 5-6 days of travel and to spend at least half a day to work everything out in a 5 minutes op, together with unison
- FBReader to read books on the fly
- And now Navicore for GPS needings, together with MaemoMapper (whose simplicity and speed are inarrivable for other progs, I think), but Navicore is a real navigation program with a very rapid track recalculation (very good feature well implemented!)

...all these with a fragmentation in the OS would not have been possible, IMHO. Many forces spreaded into too many different projects leading... where? Look at Ubuntu: it's getting every day more and more support and success, thanks mostly to their goals and a clear vision about where to go. What we really need is an optimization of every component of the platform, in order to have a well suited OS on the next product. It's a way of working that I like a lot, also perhaps not the best in a technological and radically day-changing world. But it's the best way not to waste and throw any resource.

Only feature I'm missing now is... well, just a little bit more of HP! Integrated RSS feed and browser suffer from this, and a good mail client well integrated with Maemo could be definitive. We miss a recent version of Flash, true, but I disabled Flash by default on my home PCs so you can have the idea of what I think about Flash apps and intros... When I am on a slow GPRS connection, big images and flash are totally unusuless, though I can respect other's people needings.
With next (?) hardware upgrade (no, I'm not interested in 870 because of webcam, but if it has more HP - processor and than 770 and costs not too much I can consider it) i think I will have my 'perfect toy' to carry around, but for the moment I am really satisfied with my 770. Let's say 9/10, the best tech gadget I bought in last 4 years.

The spirit on the lists seems really very open and collaborative, if Maemo will go on this way I hope it will gets the success such a project deserves.

Remember that one of the factors that gave Windows (tm) the success it has is the fact that it is the only and one, machines changes but Windows remains.

Last, once upon I was a programmer, now after more than 10 years I started coding again in my free time thanx to N770. This is perhaps one of the reasons that makes me a 770 FanBoy
Uh, and sorry for my poor english, I hope not to have misunderstood anything

Waiting for comments

Ops, and I now noted that we just got a little bit OT... that I added in the title of my reply

Well said jurop88. I think there definitely needs to be a refinement of the built-in Maemo apps rather than a completely new OS. This should be doable by Nokia, but it should also be open for developers to further enhance the apps as well. Right now, there are several apps that have replaced many of the built-in apps only because each new app only does something a little better, or more efficiently than the previous. For instance Mplayer does video without as many "file format not supported" errors as the original player, then came Nokia's own Media Streamer app that expanded the audio capabilities to other machines via UPnP. Now we have Canola, which does just about all the multimedia work for the 770. This evolutionary process has taken a little less than a year, but I believe it would have taken even less time to further develop the built-in player to do all this and more. I also think all these programs should be uninstallable and reinstallable [via flashing the device at least], giving the user the option of the greatest customization.

This goes for the web browser, email app, sketch app, games, calculator, image viewer, PDF reader, and even Google Talk. I don't have a problem with having these installed by default, but there must be some way to selectively install [during re-flashing] the programs of your choosing.

Am I talking crazy, or is this just not possible?