Now that we have hundreds of N900 testers it's a good time to settle on something that we have discussed many time in the past: the big majority of users should rely on the maemo.org Extras repository and the official Nokia repos only.

Anybody installing extras-testing, extras-devel, a third party repository, a single deb package or any combination requiring openng xterm is not a pure end user anymore but a tester. At least s/he should know! So please think it twice before posting, forwarding, reposting and recommending anything out of the stable repositories at nokia.com and maemo.org.

Two very concrete examples that current N900 users can suffer already today:

- Full memory because of apps ignoring the recommendation of installing big files in the internal memory.

- Significantly shorter use times because of widgets and apps not paying much attention to power management.

The Maemo community has put a big effort creating a quality assurance process in order to guarantee certain standards. Advanced users aware of the risks of unstable software are helping evaluating whether apps are ready for end users or not. Don't bypass all this hard work by making popular buggy software. At least not without a big warning.

End users might be happy in the short term with your links and tricks but the risk of making their Maemo life miserable are high if they are unaware of the possible consequences. Instead, giving feedback to the generally goodwilling developers will help them fixing the problems and offering the software end users want without hacks, tricks and dirt under the carpet.

BIG THANK YOU for reading this, propagating the message and helping out.