True, an "average user" whatever that means might not find too many applications ready and baked;
However "average superuser" will just do wget/tar/make/install and there'll be tens of thousands of applications available...

That's Lnux for you.

OMG

this is really tempting to sell this little piece of hardware.
It could even bring more money than a new unused N950?

Oh, why am I so blockheaded to keep these little toys until they are worth nothing?

Sell them now, regret it later. Wipe the tears of regret with the money.

Win-win!

What a shame a vast majority of them are total sheet

In fact, it's even worse than that. The sorry situation with two app stores full of crap but barely a useful app in sight nearly three years after the release are the best testimony. If it so easy to find good apps, then why aren't the app stores full of them?

Even if you do manage to find sources for something useful in the ocean of rubbish, building it on Sailfish is NOT as trivial as you suggest. Two reasons: 1) Wayland; 2) QML. Gone are the times when I could take 8 years old sources for a desktop application, run 'make' on my N900 and off we go! On Sailfish, even sources made for its direct predecessor, the N9, no longer build. Which is at least part of the reason why we still have only a fraction of the already tiny set of N9 apps ported to Sailfish.

True, but sometimes to get something new you must get rid of something old.

I don't know how good Sailfish OS would be with X11 instead of Wayland (if it would be possible at all)

Guys, lets stop crying over the good old N900-Days. We are in 2016. We have a good and quite mature base (Sailfish OS 2.x).
Lets build something usefull with it... ;-)

For the record, I was not so much crying over the N900 as I was objecting to the "so easy to wget/tar/make/install" claim. I thought it was obvious.

I doubt many read it otherwise.

I do however agree fully with the sentiment that it's time to find something more modern. But that's my personal stance. I hate these outdated pieces of hardware being peddled as my only option if I don't choose mainstream offerings instead.

And I hate reminiscing with outdated software and hardware that doesn't fulfill my needs, only barely covers my daily operations. To me, that's exactly what the N900 has become. An old relic that cannot do what I require in my livelihood or the majority of what I seek in something I'd buy today.

But that's me. It serves a lot of you guys that love terminal and old *** software just fine. That's not for me.

Ok, I know I shouldn't, but I'm gonna do it anyway: It sounds to me like your livelihood requires features that are currently 100% owned by Apple or Google. Software locked inside walled-garden ecosystems, hardware locked down to the OS of one of the major manufacturers.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing! The App Store / Google Play model has been a boon to software development, and has been built at least in part on hardware that is totally locked down, forcing consumers to play by the rules.

But I don't think people here reminisce about outdated hardware and software simply because they enjoy outdated hardware and software; they do it because they don't want to be forced to play by Apple's or Google's rules...

You'd be quite wrong despite that the majority of what I do is in that world, the majority of my tools are not. As a creative, it's easy to push me towards OS X or the like; however I've been a Linux user since the mid-90's.

But that was a damn safe assumption. I can't even get upset.

Mostly because the open source variants are woefully slipping behind the times. I personally hate GIMP, but mostly because it had feature parity with Photoshop back during Photoshop 5/6/7 days. It's nowhere near what I need now. However I friggin' love Inkscape. As of late, I've been distancing myself from Adobe products and back embracing other software. And in the Apple walled-garden, a lot of software, like Bohemian Coding Sketch, Hammer for Mac and a whole heap of others are leaving the Mac Store. And when they do, I support them each time.

The rest of the stuff I use are mostly JavaScript (read: Github is my best friend) and that means I can edit it in a plethora of ways, but mostly use Atom because I'm lazy and like code hinting, completion and it's also open source.

In our prior discussions, I've honestly never taken anything you've said as a negative; even when we disagree, you bring a discussion that I appreciate.

As a prior developer, there's one thing I do like. I can switch between tools and get a grasp on what I should expect. I cannot say that about a lot of other, out in the wild, type of tools. But it is also creates a situation where innovation is a bit stifled. Yet, in the open source scene, the innovation there has stifled yet the arguments have increased. Simply put, the FOSS scene has become a barren wasteland where the better tools that are current with the time are very likely to be out of commission next week.

That has happened to me on plenty of libraries and despite offering my expertise, forking and contributing, that **** is tiresome. I'd rather have the support since my decisions affect entire companies and not the whims of some person that's incredibly smart but easily disenfranchised.

Here's where disagree. I had the 770, N800, N810, N900 and the N9. All great for when they were released, today they don't cut it. Folks are still holding onto the Psion, Zaurus and other devices, including the Maemo devices, thinking they'd fit right in today. They do not for a lot of folks - the browser alone is a problem for what I have to code/prototype for daily.

But having to succumb to Apple/Google wishes is something I'd rather not have to do. But the FOSS scene is haphazardly in-fighting and not doing much of anything unless I want a text editor, a throwaway JavaScript library or a replacement standard for some esoteric bit of technology that I'll run into perhaps once every 3 years. Apple/Google is where the audience is at right now; and it bothers me.

That's why I wanted Jolla to succeed. And before that, MeeGo. And before that, Maemo. But fate has decided otherwise.

Aha! You know, I constantly miss the forest for the trees these days, but this comment brought to mind the overall issue at play here:

We're living in a world divided radically between Order and Chaos.

Apple has perfected Order. They fully control their own hardware and software, but have leveraged that control to create a deep, friendly, and powerful environment for consumers.

On the other side, the GNU project has unleashed Chaos. By striving (almost fanatically in my opinion) to make all source code open, and providing all the legal infrastructure for coders to write software that stays open, significant software products have been designed, built, and maintained almost entirely outside of the corporate world.

Of course, neither of these two extremes can really succeed on their own. GNU was going nowhere fast until Linus Torvalds released a small, conventional, and easily ported OS that served as the underlying infrastructure for working with open-source code on many platforms. (And his highly-ordered control of Linux has kept it together as competing free OS options continue to fall apart.)

And Apple's deep and rich user experience takes enormous effort and long lead-times to manage; which is why their most successful products have always been improvements on products that existed before. The iPod was just a souped-up MP3 player; the iPhone was just an improved cell phone; the iPad, something of a supersized combination of the iPod and iPhone...

Anyway, rambling on here. Sure, right now Order has the upper hand, and Chaos is falling behind. But I think anybody with a clear eye can see that Apple is hitting something of a wall right now. The Mac line has been stagnant for years; the iPod almost gone; the iPhone and iPad continue to make evolutionary rather than revolutionary progress. And their latest innovation? A watch?

The "failure" of open-source software is, in my opinion, not actually a failure; it is instead a measure of the great success of closed-source software in the last few years. I applaud that success, but I doubt it can continue forever. Corporations inevitably rise and fall, and in the past, software tied inextricably to those corporations ends up failing along with those who own it. In the end, only open-source software survives.

Gah, hope I haven't bored everyone to tears. Now back to your regularly scheduled commentary about horribly overpriced orphan tablets.