The worst thing about android is the UI. It's got better over the last few years but it reminds me of Symbian too much rather than what for me was the UI high point of the N9.

The multitasking model just isn't the problem people make it out to be.

The last one is what ails me most. I just cannot live with a system that hasn't got glibc, and all the goodies that come with it.
Real unix userland is mandatory or else it's just a bloated featurephone IMHO.

• I don't care for UI that much, doesn't really touch me. UI is just what is used to launch applications.
• As said, privacy issues can be solved, so no problem
• Using java is silly really, it is a bit irritating
• Multitasking, well any platform can multitask but why make it so painful?

Finally a voice of reason!

Really not bothered. It just needs ssh to get to a server and I'm good. Why run commandline software on a phone when you've got multiple 12-16 core servers with 64GB RAM and an SSD RAID array to hand?

No, that's a launcher.

Unless the apps have their own custom UIs then they too are using the UI framework that the OS provides and it's this that IMHO looks and feels a bit dated on Android and iOS. That's the problem with being spoilt by the N9's lovely UI.

All OSs provide UI frameworks (eg Sailfish's Silica) and design guides and generally developers follow them so the apps look and feel like the OS dictates.

You do realise that people on the other platforms will think Sailfish and Maemo's multitasking where you have to manage tasks yourself and they don't close when you leave the app and don't save state is even more painful to them. As a Mac user it's a running battle with Windows users in the office explaining why if you close the last window in a Mac app so there's no visible windows open, it might still be running in the dock.

IMHO there's a middle ground. N9's UI with Android style state saves and Sailfish 1.0's covers and pulley menus. Plus keep full old-style persistent apps running if the user allows them.

This "applications never quit" paradigm was used on Palm OS and, so I've heard but never used, Symbian. It annoyed me to no end. Closed should mean closed.

And I beleive the middle grouhd is the user's choice. Configurability.

Freedom to choose for yourself is my choice.

PalmOS was pretty much single tasking. Even having a music player which could run in the background was rather special.

Symbian had proper multitasking. Closing apps meant the process was ended and gone. I had a Nokia N95. Its bigest draw back was the severe lack of RAM, but it was astonishingly feature rich and supported many open standards. Neither the N9 nor SailfishOS supports the things the N95 did.

It was way beyond anything Android or iPhone, feature-wise and multitasking. From what I've read, Symbian was a real-time-OS, and thus the main CPU could be used for strict real time tasks such as modem and camera, for which other devices required extra or more complex software. But, also from what I've read, creating apps for it was hard, with too many device-specific quirks.

At least, Symbian featured preemptive Multitasking as it originats from PSION's EPOC32 that was a pre-emptive multitasking, single user operating system with memory protection, see wikipedia

Nope. On traditional PalmOS it saved state but was essentially single tasking. Because the apps were so small and data minimal you didn't really need multitasking, just the impression of multitasking was enough to be productive. Later on they merged BeOS into PalmOS but IIRC Palm never shipped a product with that version.

Symbian was proper multitasking with no state saves. What it did do differently was ask you to close apps if it ran out of ram or didn't have enough to start an app which it did frequently on Nokia phones. That's why you had to pick carefully with Nokia so you got 'Hero' devices like the e71 or n95-2 which had more ram than crap like the 5230. Every now and again Nokia would let one slip out.