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Maemo was the right platform at the right moment to compete with Android and iOS and I was very surprised they closed it down in the time of crisis instead of r

Maemo was the right platform at the right moment to compete with Android and iOS and I was very surprised they closed it down in the time of crisis instead of realising they had built exactly what was needed. It had a modern OS with memory overcommit instead of the endless drudgery of checking out-of-memory conditions as in Symbian. The N770 launched with a GUI based on Gtk and convincing OSS developers to move to Qt in later versions of the platform was bump in the road. (I think Gtk had problems with basing the inheritance model on matching strings instead of vtables as with C++, so performance on this type of devices was problematic. Or - someone please correct me. I know it feels a bit weird given the long history of Gtk.)

toyg 6y ago
It wasn't about performance; GTK (or rather a GTK-based framework called Hildon) continued to be the default toolkit all the way to Maemo 5 ("Fremantle"), which is what shipped on the N900. It was also what Intel used on Moblin, the OS that was supposed to merge with Maemo to become MeeGo. The issue with QT was all about Nokia: QT was supposed to save the Symbian platform, and also provide an on-ramp to Maemo (at least in theory - in practice nobody was really committed to that...). So the Maemo folks were obligated to switch to QT, which they did fairly easily; the result was what shipped on the N9, effectively Maemo 6 ("Harmattan") rebranded as "MeeGo 1.2". In short: QT was adopted to please the Symbian people, and it was all for nothing anyway. That suited me just fine when first announced (Hildon was an under-documented mess of C with obsolete and unusable Python bindings, whereas QT had first-class wrappers like PyQt), but many Maemo old-timers never really warmed to it.