MeeGo - The fusion of Maemo and Moblin

"Fusing" Maemo and Moblin seems about as straightforward a process as merging Android and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Sure, they're both based on a Linux kernel, but... isn't that about all? They have entirely different UIs, different software stacks, and are targeted at different classes of device.

Both Moblin and Maemo have looked very promising on their own, and I hope this is the right decision for both of them. It just seems very strange for Intel and Nokia to attempt this.

I've tried several times to use Moblin as my primary OS, and it's just too half-baked and incomplete at this point. The browser is buggy, and email lacks a lot of basic features. The network services are also unfinished or missing. The calendar doesn't sync with google calendar, there's no facebook integration, there's no address book synchronization. There's also a lot of missing UI niceties.

What's frustrating about is that all of the infrastructure is there to have those things. They've developed a nice abstraction layer for hooking into web services, as well as a great UI toolkit for building slick-looking applications on a small screen. They've also got awesome power management, and an amazingly fast boot process. Moblin makes your little atom-based netbook feel amazingly responsive.

My hunch is that Moblin has been building things from the 'bottom up', i.e. power management, networking, display drivers, and tools. Maemo seems to have the opposite approach, where they have a lot more UI polish and finished applications, but they might not have the robust underlying infrastructure code.

If both companies play to their strengths, then we might get a pretty nice linux for small screens. If that happens, I'll jump ship from Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

This seems like a last ditch effort to salvage some sort of market for both of these projects. Neither really seemed to have much of a direction, so I suspect that together they will really be able to go nowhere fast.