I'm interested to know which apps are usable and are in use with members. I'm new here so I haven't got a clue which apps have problems and can't be used because of this or that and which can with some unknown secret tweaks. So I hope if people list on this thread under different headers the apps in use and if they have been tweaked put a description of the tweak in () after the app. I will make another thread about asking usable and neccessary tweaks and patches but if there would be another member who knows how to make a list of them with links to download and instructions how to install or make to work I would really appreciate that. I use this as my main phone and have been spreading the word of N900 and trying to get my friends to use too so any help to make this magical device more usable would be great. I take is as a default that CSSU is installed but if not I would like to here benefits of not using.

My apps:

Browsers: Opera 12 testing, Fennec for email, not using micro-b as haven't been able to make it open pages or be as fast as opera.

Camera: BlessN900 (probably installed some driver for it to work)

Email: I use startmail and haven't yet found a good email app with imap support. Tried claws or something but was a buggy. Using email through Fennec browser.

RSS feed: Haven't found a working solution. Only some feeds gave a feed to a widget and could not open the plain text. Solution was when it starts to download the page instead of feed that I halt the downloading, change the address to http instead of https to get the page open. Too difficult and cybersecurityfeeds not working.

Mediaplayer: Default (is there any benefit of using other?)

Youtube: Cutetube2 testing. Can't open anything to stream and haven't learned how to able that but works through downloading to N900 first. A bit annoying.

Map: ??? Would like to have.

Internetradio: Soma. Are there other good ones?

Internet tv/podcasts: ??? Would be nice.

Whatsapp: No go. Haven't yet tried with easy debbie + netsurf browser.

Telegram: Used a while through Pidgin but was buggy and slowslowslow and other problems too. Tried through browser and I think I even managed to make it work and sent a message but browser did not remember the configure key and it takes 10 minutes to make a new key so a no go for now. Hope to find a solutions to telegeramweb. Maybe easy debbie + netsurf.

Instagram: Maybe could work through easy debbie + netsurf.

Multimedia messages: FMMS works.

Hotspot: MobileHotspot works with usb.

Kernel: PowerKernel with CSSU + overclocked to 900 with powerpatch installed.

Swap: Would like to learn to make the machine more usable by tweaking the swap but not sure how or which have real benefits. I do not like to have to shutdown the device to free memory.

Easy debbie: There are updated instructions of how to install latest debian with netsurf 3.8 but not yet tried it. Any other distros in use with members? An if why and what are benefits?

I only use my N900 as backup phone by now, even with its nostalgic bonus the system is a bit to old and slow for a daily driver. With Leste this might change, although I hope for Leste on a more modern device.

Still I have some apps on my N900 which I deem useful:

Chromium Browser: When others don't work

mBarcode: Barcode reading, fast and reliable.

Leafpad: Texteditor, as simple as it gets and just as useful.

PenPen: Quickly draw something to show it.
Or hand it to kids/grilfriends for doodling.

TimerJinni: All your simple timekeeping needs

Speedcruch: When you have to do real calculations

Pierogi: To mess with many TVs

Evopedia: Wiki at your hands even without network. useful when travelling, less useful year by year as the wiki images are severely outdated by now.

Games
ScummVM: For Monkey Island and other Lucasart Gems
Puzzles: Many little logic puzzles.
Wagic: Magic the gathering game which works for a limited number of cards up to the year 2011.

VNC Viewer: Well... for VNC

GPSjinni: To give you hope when the GPS takes to long to get a fix

And many others which I do not use anymore.
Marble Maps (unreliable), AGTL(broken), Cleven(WEP is rare now), Evilalarm(Teenager me needed it), FBReader(N9's OLED defeats the n900 by miles), Meecast, Modrana, Mypaint, Navit, Netstory, nQaap, Orechiette(808 Pureviews recording Quality is so much better), qMetro, SleepAnalyzer, Transmission

Edit: Forgot your map comment.

As said, marble (sometimes) works with Openstreetmap.
otherwise you can get Nokia Maps from here, they should work on the N900 too. However the last update for them was 2015.

Browsers:
Netsurf (fast, mostly up to date, but limited web features), Midori (slow but acceptable, pretty complete feature-wise, outdated)
Both via Easy Debian, but I try to avoid web browsing on the N900 wherever I can.

Camera:
mixed Nokia's original app (what was its name?) and BlessN900.
But always having a pretty decent compact camera never made me actually consider the N900 for that task. Actually, whenever I look at pictures I took with it, I regret not having had my actual camera with me at that time.

Email:
Claws mail via ED or web interface via Midori (depending on account)

Mediaplayer:
moc via ED. There's no actual reason for that. I just use moc wherever I can and it works well on the N900 too. The one thing moc does better than Nokia's player is that it doesn't slow down with lots of files.

Map:
mainly Marble (mostly via ED, some via Fremantle)
Fremantle's version is too old to create tracks (but still can import them) but it's easier accessible than in ED.

Kernel: PowerKernel with CSSU + overclocked to 900 with powerpatch installed.
Um, yeah, 900MHz give or take and something with "power" sounds about right. I haven't checked for too long.

Swap:
2GB on µSD card. My previous 64GB card died around Xmas so I just got a new one. (Wow, 200GB have really become cheap!)

vpnc/ssh:
Really, this has always been my main reason for getting and having the N900 in the first place. And it still works. Everything else besides phoning is really just for fun, because I can.


There's basically two groups of distros out there:
A: Those based on glibc, like ED, Debian derivatives (e.g. Kali) or basically any major Linus distro
B: Those based on anything else, e.g. musl, like Alpine

Group A has been in a coma for two years (Debian Stretch release) and is currently dying for good (Jessie fades into oblivion) because glibc doesn't like Fremantles ancient kernel anymore.
Anyone who still uses these is basically riding a dead horse. I'm just hoping my zombie horse still gets me far enough to find a living one in the form of an N900 successor.

Group B is not affected because musl doesn't care for the kernel version. But this group is largely unexplored, I guess because it doesn't promise easy accessibility of vast amounts of popular desktop software.

Hi,

for me my n900 is in everyday use so I tried to make it to fit my needs. I'm on CSSU Testing.

I. On my SD card I have:

1. Full maemo sdk development environment,
2. Fully usable kali linux distro - 1.1.0 (armhf) with i3 - it provides everything that kali has For basic stuff it is enough; not for metasploit or such... But also have rawtherapee, youtube-dl and many-many others that maemo doesn't and won't have...

II. On the device:

1. Widgets:

- one for weather data,
- one for calendar. Both is written by me in python for my needs.

2. Maps:

- Nokia Maps - tweaked version to have voice navigation and POI-s (voice navigation is not working for me though...). I have some *not too old map tiles* of my country so for me it is quite usable when I'm totally offline.
- Modrana. I install it from M4rtinK's github repo every time he releases a new version So it isn't from maemo repos... I mainly use it for hiking because I can set my country's hiking map server to to download the tiles from (in db format so uses less space!!!) but it is fairly good for everything. It was a big help 3 years ago that it measures the distance from poi - we could do some filed work easier

3. Multimedia:

- cutetube - I do have streams so I do not have to download them only some streams cannot be played...
- cutenews for rss - for me it is working fine.
- replaced the stock media player with openmediaplayer
- mplayer - sweet

4. Games:

- only the stock ones. Oh, and Bounce Earlier I had assassin's creed, monopoly but... mahjong is far enough nowadays

5. Browsing:

- Opera 12.1beta - best...
- Have fennec 17 but soooooo slow...
- chromium - it is good when it not crashes
- on kali I have midori, links2, xlinks and chromium too (latter is with tor of course) - quite good

6. Email:

- Stock. Modest is doing a great job, it is enough for me as I only use gmail.

7. Photography:

- Stock camera (derived from camera-ui2); using dng raw most of the times as I like working with the images in rawtherapee and I find them quite good. At least for my taste
- Fcamera and blessn900 and good too but with my version of libc6 thy stopped working and now I'm on the way of hunting the problem now
- Panorama - it is quite good when you can hold and turn the n900 on the proper way.
- Classicprint - use to for modifying the images.
- Rawtherapee (as said earlier)
- Mypaint - not photography but sooooooo cool

8. Other:

- Stellarium 0.10.6
- iPython and other python stuffs (scipy, matplotlib, numpy, etc.)
- FBReader for reading books - working quite well in portrait mode too
- docstogo to open or edit documents, excel sheets - only for basic stuff.
- fcron. must have

9. Tweaked stuff...:

- custom lbc6 - maemo has 2.5.1; based on Aapo's idea and experiment I have version 2.10.
- neovim (depends on libc6 > 2.7) - for programming, editing text/files
- kernel-power 53 - my device can be overclocked to 1150 MHz - I use kali that way (so far so good).
- phone-control script; I added some other switches (like set cpumax, brightness, number of desktops (up to 9), etc.) so it fit my needs.
- wget version 1.19.5
- libssl1.1.0h
- custom python script to replace operator's name with the date and nameday
- maemoneypot - my own app for tracking my financial stuffs; it uses an "updated" version of sqlite with sql-cipher so you can set a password for your sql databases...
- fingerterm - not used too much but it can be handy
- under kali weechat is working (client to matrix.org)
- backupmenu - essential!!! (I tweaked it to use libc6 library not 2.5.1)
- maybe some others but I don't remember every tweak I made

Seriously?!

Stellarium brings my Core2Duo notebook to its limits and is close to unusable on my EEE 901.
Granted, this is the current version from the stretch-backports (0.18.3), but I can't remember this being any better with earlier versions down to 0.12, so I wouldn't imagine 0.10 would be any lighter (especially on the graphics part).

why don't you try it...?

I am using Stellarium N9 0.3.6 on the N9, which is not faster than an overclocked N900. Its based on Stellarium version 0.11.4.

It works flawlessly and with the OLED screen its totally awesome. In night mode you can point it to the stars and see their name on the display without any disturbance to your night vision.

Gnumeric: because a real (and really usable) spreadsheet can be super-useful, e.g. when buying and financing a car.

Sunvox: On a phone-sized screen, using a stylus with resistive screen is essential.

Xterminal, with keyboard because of course.

could you write a foolproof way to set up gmail on modest? because i can't seem to be able to have the stock email client to work with gmail
thanks

I did, and it's speed is really impressive. So, thanks for the tip!
However, there are some features missing to make it actually useful for me.

Of course! I use it so much that I don't even consider it an app anymore. For me, "terminal" equals "N900". Everything else is just superimposed on it.