I've now concluded that Maemo is now OS to do this on
Do you have any suggestions as to how developers can go about doing this? I could be wrong, but isn't hildon-home tied into the core OS? Similar to how the Symbian homescreen is tied into Symbian. It'd be hard to successfully replace.
mattbusko: Hildon-Home, like, say, a component of GNOME/KDE/X-Server or whatever, is 'tied' to the operating system in that it's a major part of it - however, it is also, like the rest of the Hildons (Hildon Desktop, Hildon Status Menu, Hildon Input Method... I think Hildon Control Panel is the only exception, but I'm pretty sure it's not part of the Hildon Desktop environment). So yes it'd be 'hard' to replace, but not because it's hard to make the replacement possible - it's just like making the N900 support portrait-mode system wide: It's doable, it's just someone has to have the desire and motivation to sit down and rewrite large chunks of the existing code. (And then random **** like the Qt segfault-when-launched-in-portrait-mode bugs get discovered, so there's a nice layer of show stoppers like that.)
It's doable, it's just someone has to have the desire and motivation to sit down and rewrite large chunks of the existing code
Right, and that's where the difficult part comes in. Replacing the desktop environment and tying up the loose ends in the code. It's very difficult to do that successfully. Although it's open source, which makes it easier for those who are experienced, but it's still difficult nonetheless. Then there's always the task of writing the better environment to replace the old one.
I'd love to see this on the N900, but it will likely never happen.
