It had a well-polished Linux-based OS, developed in-house by Nokia. Excellent hardware for the time, and a keyboard which was a delight to use. It got pretty decent reviews - even outside of the Linux fanboy bubble.
It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.
> Maemo Leste is an operating system currently in development. It is a modernised and liberated version of Maemo 5, rebased on top of Devuan with a mainline Linux kernel. The first operating system images were released in February 2018.
> It is currently in a usable state with support for various targets such as the N900, Motorola Droid 4 and the PinePhone.
I mean, Android is mostly Linux. I don't think the kernel is the issue. The issue with librem is that they put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software.
The point is that the n900 was Gnu/Linux with glibc like mama said was good for you and worked along very similar lines to your desktop machine.
Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc.
But who cares that stuff?
It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was.
Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.
Not really, in what concerns application developers.
Only the Java/Kotlin userspace and the small set of NDK libraries are considered official and stable.
Anyone that ventures outside this path and isn't an OEM doing their own Android distribution, is on their own if the application actually works at all when deployed via the PlayStore, as the Termux guys eventually found out.
