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Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048

Firefox OS used the android closed source driver vendor centric model and a html/js frontend.

It had most of the downsides of android (closed drivers, no updates after 6 months, buy a new device or get exploited, beholden to vendors, OEMs and telcos which invariably suck, central control over software distribution), and zero of the upsides (abysmal performance [even the dialer was a laggy mess], lack of software)

Except for the fact you might trust Mozilla more than google, it wasn't anymore meaningfully open than android, and suffered crippling drawbacks in comparison. Nobody except a few developers cared that you can write apps in html/js.

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Why did the world abandon Maemo? I had a nokia n900, and I swear, it was the greatest phone I ever used. The UI was beautiful, and for 2009, its performance was stunning. I got so used to it and immersed in the "maemo" way of doing things, that when I "upgraded" to a "modern" android phone, I felt as though I had taken a step backwards, despite having hardware that's theoretically better!

Nokia went under, and the world outside of tech cares more about the shiny than the capabilities.

Actually, Nokia - under Elop's leadership - decided to go to Windows Phone platform for mobile phones, and discontinue Maemo. That WP thing didn't go so well.

However Nokia as a company did not go under; it is still very much there, particularly in telecom infra business.

It seems that very few people these days knows that all the big name European mobile brands (Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens) were also big name infrastructure brands. And that two of them still operate (Ericsson and Nokia, the latter having bought Siemens infrastructure division).

As was Motorola in the USA

Touche.

Some here used to work for that unit. :)

Really?

That explains a lot about you: although mostly your preference for strong typing. Working for a phone company will do that for you.

Yep.

No, what explains that is that I used C for the first time in 1993, yet I was already coding since 1986.

So I was doing systems like level programming in Timex Basic, Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Z80 and 80x86 on those in between years.

Also had friends using 68000, AMOS and GFA Basic on their Amigas.

Also I majored in systems level programming, with emphasis in compilers, which meant I have spent quite some time researching old programming environments, and still do. Better than reading newspapers sometimes.

So I learned that were better ways to do systems programming without having the compromises of C.

Nokia is the pacman of infra vendors: they acquired Siemens, then Motorola Networks (the infra part). Then recently they acquired ALU. ALU itself is the result of the acquisition by Alcatel of Lucent. And when Nortel went bankrupt, Alcatel also acquired part of the assets and employees. Sooo, lots of infrastructure vendors ended up in today Nokia. Maybe I even missed some ;)

Indeed; what remains of the old big infra vendors is now in Ericsson and Nokia. Then there are the Chinese ones: Huawei and ZTE. Probably others. But particularly Huawei is growing very fast in many markets - the Chinese government is basically giving the money away, so it's hard for others to make a profit, and Huawei takes market share. If you call it a "market" after such subsidies.

Some customers, particularly very many in the USA, are not so happy to have Huawei or ZTE core switches etc, but in emerging markets they are less worried about Chinese intelligence infiltrating them, and also in Europe there seems to be less protectionism and concerns about national security. So the Chinese are catching the global market, without the Americans noticing much.

Core parts were proprietary because "differentiation".

The leadership was caught in a innovators dilemma (Symbian was aging but had a massive install base, Maemo has future potential but could massacre their Symbian earnings in a transition), and the board in the end brought in a Trojan horse that made a deal with Microsoft.

Also, what you are currently seeing happening in desktop Linux land, wayland, systemd, etc etc etc, is because of lessons (X11 and sysvinit is crap) various devs "learned" while working on Maemo in some capacity or other.

yes they may not be the perfect fit in a power constrained mobile device (My N800 seemed to last me just as well as the Android devices i have around me right now though), but why the hell are we turning the whole DE stack into a mobile phone in response?!

> board in the end brought in a Trojan horse that made a deal with Microsoft.

And the lie keeps being repeated, it was the board that sold Nokia by having a contract that would grant Elop a huge bonus if he managed to do sell the company to someone else!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-a...

"According to changes implemented in 2010, Elop was entitled to immediate share price performance bonus in case of a “change of control” situation… such as selling of Nokia’s handset division."

So it was deliberate on part of the board, still made him look like a trojan horse from the outside as supposedly he was there to get the company back on track.

Only by those that don't care to read the news.

When this was known it was all over the place in European news.

The big problem is that all the OEMs that can build you a phone are providing android support because this is what they get from SOC vendors and there is no business incentive to provide "pure linux" support.

Plasma sits on top of the Android HAL like Firefox OS did. Nothing different there. Go buy you QC license and see for how long you'll get blob updates.

You're totally wrong about the performance penalty of FxOS compared to Android on the same hardware, but I'm done arguing that with trollaways.

No idea why this is being downvoted. This matches what I heard about Plasma's mobile endeavors.

In 2012, at the Akademy (KDE conference) in Tallinn, I spoke with Plasma developers who were, at the time, working on a tablet called "Vivaldi", which was supposed to ship with Plasma Active (the KDE 4 version of Plasma Mobile) based on Mer (the community fork of Meego). And they really struggled with the hardware part: They carefully assembled a BOM of parts for which open-source drivers were available, ordered test devices, built the whole software stack. And when they were ready to start mass production, the manufacturer was like: "What, that chip? That's soooo last month. We have this new chip here, which is completely undocumented, but we have an Android driver for you." Last I heard, they never got an actual device shipped because of that mess.

I don't know if it's gotten any better since then, but I can easily imagine how that situation led them to base the new Plasma Mobile on the Android HAL.

I didn't find performance to be an issue on practice. My firefox phone was silky smooth on craptastic hardware. I wish android was that smooth.

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