Hacker News Reader

Comment by underwater | Hacker News Reader

Every competitor that has tried to kickstart their own OS has failed (Microsoft, Palm, Mozilla, Ubuntu, etc.)

Maemo might have been a great OS, but Android and iOS have sucked the oxygen out of the room. There’s no way Nokia could build and support an alternative OS just for enthusiasts.

View on HN

The successor of Meego, Sailfish OS is still alive when Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and Windows Phone have been discontinued.

Exactly. And there's still no mobile platform that gives one the same experience as a PC does in terms of separation of OS and hardware, plus the possibility of running a fully open source stack. That's why Sailfish (not fully open, though), Mer, Librem, PostmarketOS, Pyra, Neo900 and many other projects keep trying.

Yes, and one should recall that Android is just a Linux usermode abstraction layer. You can have Android apps within a traditional Linux distro, and Sailfish are already doing that. My understanding is it can be technically made work pretty flawlessly, but bundling the proprietary Google Play libraries is a legal hurdle. So you are stuck with an Amazon Fire OS type "Android-clone".

And this is why we see Google shift more and more development resource out of AOSP and onto the Play platform.

The OS you get out of the repo today is very stale and bare bones compared to the early days, before Amazon Fire and like.

Ubuntu Touch is alive thanks to the community [0].

Nokia doesn't need to "build and support an alternative OS just for enthusiasts", they just need to give some support to the Halium project [1].

[0] https://ubports.com/

[1] https://halium.org/

Yes, Maemo was just a Debian-based distro. They introduced a few changes, but it was largely just another Linux distro. And that's why it was so good.

It doesn't require big efforts, just a bit of sanity choosing components and perhaps mainlining drivers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com