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Jan
14
The superior, tinier desktop?
Tagged with communication, desktop, GNOME, maemo, mobile, rant, ubuntu
Ploughing through my feeds today, I came across Jonny’s post about the Telepathic goodness he’s playing with on his N900. Very nice.
Which brings me to one simple question. Why can’t we, with our powerful computers and full-blown GNOME desktops have any of these nice things? We run the same stuff: evolution-data-server, D-bus, mission-control and the Telepathy connectors. Yet, we have an address book that doesn’t know whether or not our friends are online. Nor can we send IM and email from the same application based on this presence information.
Nothing has happened since I last pondered this question in November 2008. Maybe I should start running Maemo on my desktop? Does the N900 support high resolution external displays? Clearly it is superior.
Comments
5 Responses to “The superior, tinier desktop?”
Because Maemo was custom designed with defined vision and target goals for functionality and integration as a platform.
And GNOME is a bunch of people doing whatever they want.
You are right! And the worst is that it seems that the desktop developers don’t realize that! Each one is so focused on his/her requirements and no one thinking on top of it. What I miss more is this integration/sharing of data – being it on cloud or not – and desktop apps just like you pointed out. Ubuntu folks seems to be realizing that but the development seems too slow for me: a new feature to show every six months, surely they could do more.
Apart from that… it’s important to say also that we’ve been seeing much more innovation/beauty/polished interfaces on tiny devices these days than on full-blown desktops. Who’ll save us?
…and there are roughly 17 other like projects all hitting the same road bump most sharing the same end of failure. I like my choices but I would rather two great ones instead of too many so-so ones. I am most hopeful for KDE4 as so far (switched full time last week) it has great consistency over Gnome. Preferences in the same spot in all apps?!?!?!? Blasphemy!
:)
I love my Android. Best OS, desktop or otherwise, that I’ve ever used.
It might have to do with how much money is put into a project. From what I have gathered on PGO, there were (are?) really many people working on Maemo alone, and I suppose they are lots more than are paid for actual Gnome development.