MeeGo
Nice review of the first release of MeeGo for netbooks. If readers are interested to know more about the differences between MeeGo and Android, I have an article posted here: http://bit.ly/cu6RAw
MeeGo is a big deal. Devices plus cloud is the big trend right now and MeeGo has seen two industry giants - Intel and Nokia - combine efforts to create a Linux offering capable of competing with Windows on netbooks, Apple and Google on phones and tablets, and embedded operating systems on just about anything else from TVs to …
I tried this the other day on my original Acer Aspire One. Surprised about the slow booting - was much quicker than that, even from a USB live image, on to a much lower spec netbook. However I found the DNS flaky and there was no support for my bog standard Vodafone 3G stick, rendering it rather useless for its main raison d'etre. I also found some of the user interface elements a bit overbearing, with no obvious means to adjust - this is in common with Moblin, and I'd hoped they might have resolved that by now. Interesting, but not ready for prime time.
I downloaded the SDK onto my Kubuntu Linux machine. And found out it would not run. The reason being is that you have to have an Intel graphics chipset. All my computers have a ATI or Nvidia graphics chip. So I and and a 100,000 other self respecting Linux developers without Intel graphics can't use the SDK and therefore can't develop apps for Meego.
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I installed this not long ago on my Acer Aspire One (which I've now sold) and my experience was far better. The boot time was well under 20 seconds and resume from standby was instant (save for the inevitable wait for the wireless to re-establish a connection). I'm also pretty sure the tap-to-click option was configurable, although I like this feature so would have left it on anyway.
I had previously tried Moblin and MeeGo was much more polished; also Moblin's mouse sensitivity was terrible, MeeGo has sorted that completely.
I tried it on my netbook, and it was beyond lame. The interface was clearly trying for "device" rather than "computer", but was failing hard due to being slow and cluttered. The clients it forced on you were very incpmplete (other than Chrome, probably the best of the bunch- but I still miss a proper adblock and noscript).
What's worse, the damn thing only seemed to be able to maintain a wifi connection for about five minutes at a time- in the same room as the damn router.
Horrible experience, nuked it, back to Umbongo, which was faster and more reliable.
Nokia haven't nurtured a community of followers for Meego because the way they handle that community. I.E. badly. It won't get that community without big changes to the 'finger' it gives us. Afterall the Maemo community are the QT developers that Meego will be based on.
I would give Meego a year from release before it becomes anywhere near stable. And perhaps a year longer for an app store to work. Or at least one you want to visit. Nokia rely 100% on developers to do their work, they as the owning body have done nothing to back it.
Jobs and the other players won't be too worried with this.
The default install image, also allows running from the USB stick - from which the boot times don't seem too bad . and certainly not the 2 minutes quoted in this article- works on my aspire one/msi wind/ and even the old 512Mb eeePC - wifi's supports good - but agreed the 3G modem support is non-existant.
The development mailing lists seem very active , so think things are going to develop in leaps and bounds
Nokia seem to be busy destroying the community they built up around Maemo and which they will need to help them make MeeGo a success for them. See http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=55913 and, most recently, http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=57214