Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

exactly.

in the end ...a handheld device running linux ...whether it be a phone or not...will always be viable...
what it looks like...what is under the hood...etc...is a different issue..

Maemo os ...if it is not liberated from its constraining shackles will perish for good.
Porting it to a device or a couple of devices isn't enough.
Mainstreaming it to slide effortlessly on top of devuan or debian (proper) means maemo never dies. It can use any program debian has, can be kept current more easily, will bring old users back and many more new users ...with the potential to have more users than in total the arm based devices did...
We can bide our time as a proper os as well...wait until devices come around which fit our needs and make an arm derivative to utilize on handhelds again.

The maemo os ....the software ...and more... the life expectancy of the community itself is at stake here....if we do not tackle the core issue.

Hoping on any single manufacturer or any single device or (even if we luck out) device line to save maemo os ....save the community from extinction is a very narrow view ...narrow hope....with an inevitable at the end of it ...if we pin hopes on a specific physical device.
Pinning hopes for maemo on a device to save our community and os is just staving off the inevitable ...temporarily ...

If ever "Maemo OS " 32 and 64 bit ....shows up on distrowatch ...
That is the day I erase all my other distros from their hard drives...and just happily use Maemo on all my laptops ...for the rest of my days.

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

endsormeans,
I agree Maemo5 is a great UI for phones and tablets, I sometimes even VNC my N900 screen onto my LineageOS tablet.
I would probably keep Gnome-flashback on my laptop though.
How hard would it be to hack curent KDE into a Maemo flavored touch UI fork? Throw that onto ARM Debian and you would only rarely notice the difference from full Maemo5.

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

Well, there is a reason why there are no decent mobile x86/64 devices out there:

Intel is the only company producing (kinda) mobile x86/64 cpus/apus. (AMD isn't even an option when it comes to phones.)

Intel isn't interested in the smartphone market at all.
They tried and kinda failed.
x86/64 simply isn't made for mobile devices.
Altough Intels latest chips do perform quite well power and efficiency wise, they still don't come close to ARM, in that regard.
Ultrabooks, tablets and MS Surface-line are a different pony, obviously.
You can't cheap out on power&efficiency when it comes to smartphones.

If x86/64 was that much better than ARM, like you make it sound to be, there would be more mobile devices running on x86/64-silicone, or am I wrong?
If that was the case, Jolla, Canonical or Mozilla, for example, wouldn't have chosen ARM for their operating systems.


ARM, with its many competitors; which push for offering the best mobile chipset, proven suitability for mobile devices, linux-friendlier nature, is the only hope for Maemo.

So we're better off, waiting for a open device with an open ARM chipset.




(Hi Chen)

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

Nice to see that discussion about Neo900 is starting again.

I would actually now be interested, which features of this phone might be most interesting or most important for buyers. Hardware specs might not be so important for most buyers. Example: Nobody complained about "only" 1 GB RAM in iphone 6, it was even no problem that the amount of RAM was not publicly announced by Apple.

Is it...
... usage of linux package management on your phone (apt-get)?
... privacy?
... security?
... choice between multiple OSes?
... default no Android?
... Maemo?
... root access out of the box?
... hacking and tinkering experience?
... not boring as the usual android phones?
... using standard linux apps?
... ability to run current linux kernel for long time?
... ability to run native Linux Apps and Android apps at the same phone?
... standard linux desktop like experience?
... updated N900 with more than enough RAM compared to almost no free RAM on N900?
...

I hope you share your ideas on this topic.

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

What makes anybody think a kickstarter was to increase the price for the device? The opposite is true, since, as always stated, we need a certain number of orders to make the project happen as calculated. To reach that number of orders, we consider a kickstarter now since preorders never reached that threshold.

best regards
jOERG

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

This been the first newspost of our new Communications Officer volunteer sn0wmonster. However it been reviewed by 4 other people who found it OK, and a number of users appreciated the post in IRC. If you think it's not answering your questions or otherwise lacks any topic you want to get covered, please talk to sn0wmonster, he asked for exactly this type of feedback to improve on the next newsposts he promised will come on regular schedule now.

many thanks for your support.

jOERG

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

leaving other points of criticism in your post aside, this is particularly incorrect. The idea is explicitly to finish proto_v2 to have a working product to show off, before doing a kickstarter to reach the needed number of preorders that never came in after all those years.

BR
jOERG

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

For all I know the Pi boot via a closed blob bootloader loaded to the graphics accelerator hardware. While the Neo900 much contrary to all contemporary smartphones, has basically an all FOSS bootloader chain that allows you runing the OS of your choice on the hardware without stuff like jailbreak, cyanogenmod or kexec-hacks

[edit} I forgot to mention the phone modem which I don't know of any one working with a fully open protocol on any of the existing smartphones. Neo900 does.
/j

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

To you list I would add "Very portable X11 server". I have a work-related need for that.
Every Android X11 server I've tried has been vastly inferior to using an N900.

Re: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
 

Joerg, nice to see you participating in the thread again, it has been tumbleweed for a while. Communication is key, I have to admit I had pretty much written the project off!

Best of luck!