5 ms·

Just like desktop KDE, the UI doesn't appeal to me. I find it too flashy and kind of "in your face". My favorite mobile OS so far has been Meego that ran on N9

Just like desktop KDE, the UI doesn't appeal to me. I find it too flashy and kind of "in your face". My favorite mobile OS so far has been Meego that ran on N9. That device was mind blowing and that OS. Amazing. It had such a simple, yet useful UI. Multi-tasking was better than what even Android has now. I hope Jolla doesn't die like that and we see a lot more devices come out running Sailfish.

swiley 10y ago
It looks like it's running wayland, so you can probably just run X11 (with fvwm or whatever).
oever 10y ago
I'm still using my N950 with Meego. Very nice device and OS. My other phone runs Ubuntu Mobile which is also very nice. Judging from the video, the state of Plasma Mobile is very impressive.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I never had a Meego phone, or a Nokia at all. But I still want an N900: Physical keyboard, a hackable Linux base, and a system that's not very powerful, but usually powerful enough. And that was in '09. It may be underpowered now, but that physical keyboard still makes my envious: I could almost maybe write code on something like that.
- Jedd 10y ago
  > It may be underpowered now, but that physical > keyboard still makes my envious: I could almost > maybe write code on something like that. I had one. That's what I thought. I was wrong. It was slower than swype & variants for normal (mail, sms, etc) writing. The physical keyboard had the benefit of providing relatively easy access to 'dev' keys - esc, ctrl, special characters. But it was so teeny that even as a proficient user (it was my primary phone for 3-4 years) the experience was arduous. Years later I bought a tablet + BT keyboard (a Logitech one with the hard clam shell that became the stand) and that experience is much preferred. Would work well with a phone too, if you're happy with a small screen. Not pocket sized, certainly, but the keyboard is actually usable.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    I've actually had a phone with a physical keyboard. And IMHO, it's way better than any digital keyboard I've ever used: I could consistantly type exactly the characters I wanted. And fast, too.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    I don't relate; I'm a super fast typist on my N900. I do still hate that pipes and angle brackets aren't on the keyboard, and wish they had just designed it with a fourth row. I've done a lot of server work through it; anything that wasn't worth going back to my desk. Pulling the N900 out and ssh'ing in is a 5-10 second prospect. I can't stand on-screen keyboards, but I think part of that is that most phones are capacitive and if one press doesn't register, it throws your whole rhythm off. Of course some huge physical keyboard would be better. I've definitely coded bash on it, many times.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      ...And this is why I might buy a BlackBerry. Because while BB phones are Android now, they still have real keyboards.
    - pre 10y ago
      Yep. I miss that keyboard.
  - pre 10y ago
    I don't think I could have used it to write code, though I never tried very hard coz it was so frustrating. Practice would have helped. But I could and did use it to write and edit long-form prose. It's way better than a touch-screen for shelling in and fixing server issues when you're stuck at a party away from keyboard. Actual code writing tends to mean using lots of symbols though, and while the N900 keyboard was better than a touch screen, both make you want to rip open your skull and put the wires in directly in frustration. I miss that keyboard. When I had that keyboard, the best email-interface was still Mutt over a terminal. You could use Vim! Type without looking! It was ace. That phone had the best microphone out of any I've ever owned by a clear mile too. Certainly the only one that could stand up to being used in the band practice-room without just distorting to hell coz of the volume. I still use it for that, for video-recording band-practise, cos nothing else ever came close. The USB port broke and now can only transfer files with WI-FI and have to use an external battery charger, and all my batteries are swelling slightly and really ought to be retired. But I don't have anything else that will actually work for it.
lphnull 10y ago
Is meego like maemo? I used to have a Nokia n900, and that thing was the greatest phone I ever had! It's amazing at multitasking, and it feels like having an actual desktop in your pocket.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Meego was a merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, so yes. Sailfish is the modern descendant.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Best i can tell it is complicated. Sailfish is based of Mer, A community reimplementation of Maemo without the proprietary Nokia bits (power management being a key part), that was started before the merger. But adopted various Meego elements afterwards. BTW, it was the Sailfish IRC channel that spawn the supposed Poettering death threat. It was actually a bad joke about using kickstarter to fund an assassin after the Sailfish teams latest late night session of fixing breakages that a updated systemd caused. yes, Sailfish use systemd. And they were also a early adopter, if not instigator, of Wayland.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      God, what were they thinking? The one and only feature I want integrated into systemd is the ability to execute a command to punch Lennart in the face. If they did that, I might use it for a week.
andmarios 10y ago
To be fair though, Nokia (and its Meego department) had close relationships with the KDE developer community due to Qt and if I recall correctly, even chose some libraries from KDE applications (like KOffice/Calligra) to use in their mobile apps.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah, at the tail end of the Maemo timeline Nokia bought Trolltech, the Norwegian company responsible for Qt. Earlier versions of Maemo had been using GTK. The intro of the Qt based Maemo 5 on the N900 effectively drove a wedge into the community, in particular as Nokia gave away N900s at the unveiling. At the same time Nokia and Intel could not agree on the structure of Meego, with Intel first going deb (same as Maemo) but then switching to rpm with Moblin2. In the end the whole mess was handed over to the Linux Foundation as both parties lost interest (Intel started Moblin in large part to light a fire under Microsoft to support mobile Atom).
- owaislone 10y ago
  QT and other KDE tech is pretty solid. No complains there. It's just that I can't bring myself to use their software because of the UI/UX. All they do is make things blue, transparent and big. I don't know what their fixation with desktop widgets is. No one uses that after a point. They get old real fast. A good shell should be invisible. It should let apps take the center stage but still keep everything readily available. I find KDE to be overly complex without making things easier. A lot of people will probably not like it but I find Unity to be an amazing desktop shell. It's completely gets out of your way and still gives you so much power. My only issue with Unity7 is that it sometimes gets a bit slow on relatively older hardware.
Trufa 10y ago
I know this is a completely subjective matter but I'm really surprised you'd use the word flashy and in your face as a description, I really like it, but boring and dull could fit better as a criticism IMO, specially with older versions, I'm really curious about your choice of words, this is what it looks like to me: http://i.imgur.com/J82pZMh.png http://i.imgur.com/J82pZMh.png You'd say that is flashy? Just curious :)
- duaneb 10y ago
  That screenshot is almost entirely text. It doesn't give a sense of the actual KDE ui.
  - mongrol 10y ago
    Actually it's almost entirely white space, which does give a sense of the actual KDE ui.
  - Trufa 10y ago
    Better? http://i.imgur.com/3FHVKNC.png http://i.imgur.com/3FHVKNC.png still the same in my opinion.
- owaislone 10y ago
  Of course, it's totally subjective. It's not boring a dull to me. I find Gnome to be boring and dull (and I like that). I also was talking more about KDE shell than the apps but the apps are somewhat similar :) I mean checkout this: https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/images/kde430-desktop_thumb.jpg https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/images/kde430-desktop_... Too much going on. Too much transparency, too much eye candy as if everything is made of glass. Plus the unnecessary widgets to hold desktop icons. I'm no expert in UI/UX design but as a user I find it unpleasant.
owaislone 10y ago
.. on the other hand Gnome2 used to be pretty great. It didn't look pretty and took quite some effort to make it look good with themes and icon sets but it was a highly usable, easy to use and yet powerful desktop. I hate the direction Gnome3 is going in. Every Gnome3 app feels like designed for iPad instead of keyboard+mouse. iPad apps and Gnome3 apps basically have same UI philosophy. I can't even begin to explain how wrong that is. Even Apple has not "dumbed down" their dekstop apps to make them iPad like. Just other day I was trying latest Ubuntu on a pen drive and I couldn't believe that renaming a directory now open a modal dialog that asks you for the new name of the directory. WTH? What was wrong with the inline directory naming? It was perfect and everyone else does it. It's such a basic thing to understand. You rename an item and edit it's name inline. You see all the time what you are remaning. As soon as you rename it, you see the change take effect immediately and see the new item take new place if sorting changes. Instead we now have a modal dialog that that asks for the new name. I also couldn't find any "create new file" in right click. What was wrong with that? IRRC, the search button also does open a dialog elsewhere. Then come GnomeShell. That thing has 4 different types of controls on 4 edges of the screen. Every edge has a different control. Left has dock, top has a panel, right has workspace switcher and bottom has yet another panel which hosts different indicators than the top panel. I think bottom one handles 3rd party app indicators. Why do I as a user have to remember which different positions for different indicators? If I open something from top left corner (launcher) and want to switch workspace, I'll to drag my mouse all the way from top left corner to the right edge. I just don't get it. I do actually really like Unity7. It's simple, clean and yet powerful. All indicators are in 1 place, switcher is simply inside dock and has amazing keyboard accessibility. I hope Unity8 doesn't ruin it with it's focus on mobile. /rant I don't hate Gnome. I love Gnome and has great respect and gratitude for it's developers. They are some of the best developers I know. It's just that the recent UX decisions have made it unusable for me and it kills me to think about how amazing and simple Gnome could have been.
- abrowne 10y ago
  Have you tried MATE, such as with Ubuntu MATE? I prefer Xfce, but MATE is a great fork and update of GNOME 2.

swiley 10y ago

It looks like it's running wayland, so you can probably just run X11 (with fvwm or whatever).

oever 10y ago

I'm still using my N950 with Meego. Very nice device and OS. My other phone runs Ubuntu Mobile which is also very nice. Judging from the video, the state of Plasma Mobile is very impressive.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I never had a Meego phone, or a Nokia at all. But I still want an N900: Physical keyboard, a hackable Linux base, and a system that's not very powerful, but usually powerful enough. And that was in '09. It may be underpowered now, but that physical keyboard still makes my envious: I could almost maybe write code on something like that.

Jedd 10y ago
> It may be underpowered now, but that physical > keyboard still makes my envious: I could almost > maybe write code on something like that. I had one. That's what I thought. I was wrong. It was slower than swype & variants for normal (mail, sms, etc) writing. The physical keyboard had the benefit of providing relatively easy access to 'dev' keys - esc, ctrl, special characters. But it was so teeny that even as a proficient user (it was my primary phone for 3-4 years) the experience was arduous. Years later I bought a tablet + BT keyboard (a Logitech one with the hard clam shell that became the stand) and that experience is much preferred. Would work well with a phone too, if you're happy with a small screen. Not pocket sized, certainly, but the keyboard is actually usable.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  I've actually had a phone with a physical keyboard. And IMHO, it's way better than any digital keyboard I've ever used: I could consistantly type exactly the characters I wanted. And fast, too.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  I don't relate; I'm a super fast typist on my N900. I do still hate that pipes and angle brackets aren't on the keyboard, and wish they had just designed it with a fourth row. I've done a lot of server work through it; anything that wasn't worth going back to my desk. Pulling the N900 out and ssh'ing in is a 5-10 second prospect. I can't stand on-screen keyboards, but I think part of that is that most phones are capacitive and if one press doesn't register, it throws your whole rhythm off. Of course some huge physical keyboard would be better. I've definitely coded bash on it, many times.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    ...And this is why I might buy a BlackBerry. Because while BB phones are Android now, they still have real keyboards.
  - pre 10y ago
    Yep. I miss that keyboard.
- pre 10y ago
  I don't think I could have used it to write code, though I never tried very hard coz it was so frustrating. Practice would have helped. But I could and did use it to write and edit long-form prose. It's way better than a touch-screen for shelling in and fixing server issues when you're stuck at a party away from keyboard. Actual code writing tends to mean using lots of symbols though, and while the N900 keyboard was better than a touch screen, both make you want to rip open your skull and put the wires in directly in frustration. I miss that keyboard. When I had that keyboard, the best email-interface was still Mutt over a terminal. You could use Vim! Type without looking! It was ace. That phone had the best microphone out of any I've ever owned by a clear mile too. Certainly the only one that could stand up to being used in the band practice-room without just distorting to hell coz of the volume. I still use it for that, for video-recording band-practise, cos nothing else ever came close. The USB port broke and now can only transfer files with WI-FI and have to use an external battery charger, and all my batteries are swelling slightly and really ought to be retired. But I don't have anything else that will actually work for it.

lphnull 10y ago

Is meego like maemo? I used to have a Nokia n900, and that thing was the greatest phone I ever had! It's amazing at multitasking, and it feels like having an actual desktop in your pocket.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Meego was a merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, so yes. Sailfish is the modern descendant.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Best i can tell it is complicated. Sailfish is based of Mer, A community reimplementation of Maemo without the proprietary Nokia bits (power management being a key part), that was started before the merger. But adopted various Meego elements afterwards. BTW, it was the Sailfish IRC channel that spawn the supposed Poettering death threat. It was actually a bad joke about using kickstarter to fund an assassin after the Sailfish teams latest late night session of fixing breakages that a updated systemd caused. yes, Sailfish use systemd. And they were also a early adopter, if not instigator, of Wayland.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    God, what were they thinking? The one and only feature I want integrated into systemd is the ability to execute a command to punch Lennart in the face. If they did that, I might use it for a week.

andmarios 10y ago

To be fair though, Nokia (and its Meego department) had close relationships with the KDE developer community due to Qt and if I recall correctly, even chose some libraries from KDE applications (like KOffice/Calligra) to use in their mobile apps.

digi_owl 10y ago
Yeah, at the tail end of the Maemo timeline Nokia bought Trolltech, the Norwegian company responsible for Qt. Earlier versions of Maemo had been using GTK. The intro of the Qt based Maemo 5 on the N900 effectively drove a wedge into the community, in particular as Nokia gave away N900s at the unveiling. At the same time Nokia and Intel could not agree on the structure of Meego, with Intel first going deb (same as Maemo) but then switching to rpm with Moblin2. In the end the whole mess was handed over to the Linux Foundation as both parties lost interest (Intel started Moblin in large part to light a fire under Microsoft to support mobile Atom).
owaislone 10y ago
QT and other KDE tech is pretty solid. No complains there. It's just that I can't bring myself to use their software because of the UI/UX. All they do is make things blue, transparent and big. I don't know what their fixation with desktop widgets is. No one uses that after a point. They get old real fast. A good shell should be invisible. It should let apps take the center stage but still keep everything readily available. I find KDE to be overly complex without making things easier. A lot of people will probably not like it but I find Unity to be an amazing desktop shell. It's completely gets out of your way and still gives you so much power. My only issue with Unity7 is that it sometimes gets a bit slow on relatively older hardware.

Trufa 10y ago

I know this is a completely subjective matter but I'm really surprised you'd use the word flashy and in your face as a description, I really like it, but boring and dull could fit better as a criticism IMO, specially with older versions, I'm really curious about your choice of words, this is what it looks like to me: http://i.imgur.com/J82pZMh.png http://i.imgur.com/J82pZMh.png You'd say that is flashy? Just curious :)

duaneb 10y ago
That screenshot is almost entirely text. It doesn't give a sense of the actual KDE ui.
- mongrol 10y ago
  Actually it's almost entirely white space, which does give a sense of the actual KDE ui.
- Trufa 10y ago
  Better? http://i.imgur.com/3FHVKNC.png http://i.imgur.com/3FHVKNC.png still the same in my opinion.
owaislone 10y ago
Of course, it's totally subjective. It's not boring a dull to me. I find Gnome to be boring and dull (and I like that). I also was talking more about KDE shell than the apps but the apps are somewhat similar :) I mean checkout this: https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/images/kde430-desktop_thumb.jpg https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/images/kde430-desktop_... Too much going on. Too much transparency, too much eye candy as if everything is made of glass. Plus the unnecessary widgets to hold desktop icons. I'm no expert in UI/UX design but as a user I find it unpleasant.

owaislone 10y ago

.. on the other hand Gnome2 used to be pretty great. It didn't look pretty and took quite some effort to make it look good with themes and icon sets but it was a highly usable, easy to use and yet powerful desktop. I hate the direction Gnome3 is going in. Every Gnome3 app feels like designed for iPad instead of keyboard+mouse. iPad apps and Gnome3 apps basically have same UI philosophy. I can't even begin to explain how wrong that is. Even Apple has not "dumbed down" their dekstop apps to make them iPad like. Just other day I was trying latest Ubuntu on a pen drive and I couldn't believe that renaming a directory now open a modal dialog that asks you for the new name of the directory. WTH? What was wrong with the inline directory naming? It was perfect and everyone else does it. It's such a basic thing to understand. You rename an item and edit it's name inline. You see all the time what you are remaning. As soon as you rename it, you see the change take effect immediately and see the new item take new place if sorting changes. Instead we now have a modal dialog that that asks for the new name. I also couldn't find any "create new file" in right click. What was wrong with that? IRRC, the search button also does open a dialog elsewhere. Then come GnomeShell. That thing has 4 different types of controls on 4 edges of the screen. Every edge has a different control. Left has dock, top has a panel, right has workspace switcher and bottom has yet another panel which hosts different indicators than the top panel. I think bottom one handles 3rd party app indicators. Why do I as a user have to remember which different positions for different indicators? If I open something from top left corner (launcher) and want to switch workspace, I'll to drag my mouse all the way from top left corner to the right edge. I just don't get it. I do actually really like Unity7. It's simple, clean and yet powerful. All indicators are in 1 place, switcher is simply inside dock and has amazing keyboard accessibility. I hope Unity8 doesn't ruin it with it's focus on mobile. /rant I don't hate Gnome. I love Gnome and has great respect and gratitude for it's developers. They are some of the best developers I know. It's just that the recent UX decisions have made it unusable for me and it kills me to think about how amazing and simple Gnome could have been.

abrowne 10y ago
Have you tried MATE, such as with Ubuntu MATE? I prefer Xfce, but MATE is a great fork and update of GNOME 2.