It's because of the "no-one knows why hardware semi-randomly fails to initialize properly" issue talked over a few times, it's usually fixed by systemctl poweroff and booting again, and mostly manifests when you shutdown Maemo and boot to other OS with more recent kernel. No idea where to start looking, the usual suspects being u-boot and kernel.

I guess it counts as a hobby. I like doing stuff with my devices. I do my computing mostly on command line and probably way differently than the average Joe, so my expectations from OS are probably quite different too. There is probably lesser than zero reasons to install anything anywhere unless there is a will and/or reason to do it. In my case reasons probably are enthusiasm, curiosity and personal preference, experimenting. One of the ideals behind Arch Linux itself, is to provide modern, up-to-date, minimal base system from which you can make your system to be (almost) whatever you want it to be.

I use it as a platform for few of my past time projects, like the awesome configuration mentioned earlier. It's also been a great learning experience about Linux in embedded/mobile devices.

In addition, I sometimes use it at work for few things, like carrying around installation media images, which I can conveniently boot straight from N900 by "exporting" them as usb-cdrom with g_mass_storage, occasional network testing, small stuff like that.

I'm a long time Arch user (though that's probably going to change soonish) and I just wanted to see my N900 run it, that's the main idea behind this.

I also thought it would be nice to provide a working, modern, lightweight and more importantly a real Linux base system for everyone interested in developing with mobile Linux.

Unfortunately it seems there's practically zero interest for such, and the general preference seems to be split in few camps: people trying to keep Fremantle alive with all of it's faults and wrongs, people wanting Ubuntu to run sh*t slow on their devices, and people wanting Android/Tizen/WebOS/Sailfish/Insert-something-new-that-wont-run-on-lower-end-devices-here. So, that leaves this project practically abandoned but at least there's quite a lot of groundwork done, in case someone actually starts doing something productive.