I've been a Debian user for about 10 years, a Linux user for 15, and a computer user for 20 (I'm 30, myself). I've seen a lot of devices and OSes come and go (Sharp Zaurus C7x0, Palm 5, Kyocera's first palm smartphone, IBM PS/2 with microchannel, DOS/Novell, OS/2, Win95, NT4, QNX) ....

One thing that strikes me about the n900/Maemo is that its team seems to be composed of people who really, really get it. They get versioning. They get package and update distribution. They get openness. They get community. And they seem to really get the engineering/marketing compromise.

Honestly, I've only had my n900 for about a week now, but virtually everything I've played with is done they way I - as a Unix user with 15 years experience - think it should be done. None of this "oh crap... this is gonna come back to haunt us in a year" or inexplicable configuration choices. No silly/lazy hacks. No quirks. A few bugs, sure. But it's only been out for a couple months.

The major decisions seem to have been made by people who have "been there, done that." Library choices, base packages, the sound engine, the extras repository, the SDK..

It's downright exciting thinking about the possibilities here.

If Nokia's marketing guys play it right, Maemo could be the single unified handheld device operating system. There is almost no long-term reason to choose another OS. There are simply no long-term advantages to anything else except current app support.

Maemo is well established (Debian, X11, plus Nokia did their job right), it's open and free to implement (less of course Nokia's quite excellent proprietary extensions, giving them a head start and competitive advantage), rock solid (crashes should be obsolete; generally speaking, Linux doesn't crash). Secure, extensible, and open.

Think about it: we've seen the coming and going of DOS, OS/2, Windows 9x, QNX, PalmOS (ie. Garnet), non-BSD MacOS, and a whole host of other OSes.

The Linux stack (kernel + GNU userspace + X11) has outlived all of them. And that's what Maemo is based on.

It's a good time to be an engineer.

So anyway, to the original poster... relax a little. If this device isn't polished enough for you, and lacks the apps you need, sell your device and get something else. There are lots of great devices out there.

Right now Maemo represents an incredible potential, and for many - like me - literally a dream come true. A proper functioning pocket unix system.