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I liked Meego. Is Mer just Meego with a better governance model? Does anyone know? I'd love to use it in places a lot of people think of using Android.

Yes Mer is a fork of the Meego project (partial since Meego was rather broad) with better governance model (meritocratcy).

You can read about Mer's story here:

http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-dev/2011-October/484215.html
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/interview/carsten-munk.html
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mer is a core distribution, providing a base for vendors and community distributions to create end user products.

Mer based projects for example are Plasma Active (KDE's mobile targeted version currently focused on tablets) and Nemo Mobile (handset targeted distribution, inherited from Meego handset).

Jolla is using Mer and components of Nemo to build their handset with their interface on top.

Edited 2012-08-23 02:33 UTC

I'm still a little confused. Nemo is for handsets, built on Mer, and has a UI based on QT. Isn't Plasma Active also based on QT? And Jolla will build something based on QT and on a handset, but it won't be Nemo.

Android does all three, so I know how to write an app for that. How exactly do I write a... Mer app? Nemo app? Are they all the same? Do they interoperate at all?

All the docs seem to be aimed at people putting stuff on hardware, or people looking to contribute straight to one of the projects, and there's stuff for writing QT apps... but what do I do as a potential App writer?

Qt is a base library which doesn't force you how UI should look and it can be used with various DEs and window managers, mobile and desktop ones.

Plasma Active uses KWin and their user interface to create a mobile optimized UX. Nemo is using Lipstick QML desktop to create the user experience. Jolla didn't really explain what they'll use besides Mer core and potentially some parts of Nemo to create their UX.

However, all these derivatives share common architecture - they are all conventional Linux (using either X.org or Wayland unlike Android which is incompatible with above) and common libraries (see http://gitweb.merproject.org/gitweb ).

So if you write a mobile Linux application using those libraries (including Qt for the interface for example) - you'll be able to build it for any of those distributions. Note that they can be built for various architectures (x86, ARMv7hl, ARMv7l, MIPS and etc.). So if you figure out what device you target - you can build your application for it for example with cross compilation (see
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK
http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK_and_SB2

Adjusting your application to various form factors (different tablets, handsets and etc.) is the question of your design and flexibility of that application, it's not bound to the distribution per se. If you want to fit a certain theme/style that's already another question.


Mer is not an end user distro. Writing a "Mer app" means creating some library or runtime for example.



GUI mobile application with Qt. You can compile it for Nemo target using the Mer SDK.



Mer derivatives aren't the same, but they are close enough to make porting between them easy. If architecture matches, one can potentially run some application even without recompilation, but there can be version differences and other specifics. In most cases you can just compile your program for different Mer based targets and that's it.



You can start with getting familiar with using Mer SDK. There are Hello World examples on the SDK & SB2 page:

https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK_and_SB2

Mer also allows using OBS.

Edited 2012-08-24 08:01 UTC

Is it just me or should you not have any faith what-so-ever in any linux distribution that has Intel as one of its Corporate sponsors.

First there was Moblin, then Meego, now Tizen. I'd say the same for Nokia, but Mameo shipped on products for a while. But that was old Nokia, before the stealth MS takeover.

That could be the case if that distribution was community managed (like Meego's fork, Mer for example). But Intel and Nokia weren't just sponsors, they effectively fully controlled Meego, so naturally when they quit - it stopped as a project.

Intel is, at the moment, the number 1 corporate contributor to the Linux kernel project.

No one stops Intel from contributing to Mer.

Sure, but will they? I doubt it..

I doubt it too so far. They want more corporate control, however that's exactly why Meego failed as a project, and Tizen has the same intrinsic risk.

No MeeGo was big success.

Its CEO of Nokia who killed it with no sane reason. You know that N9 smartphone getting better revies than iPhone? Or N95 who won design prize __over__ iPad2?

Problem with Mer is not lack of Intel engagements but lack of OEMs.

Intel wants their CPU/GPU shipped on handsets. Mer could not deliver that, Tizen could. (Though how Jolla will change that is still unknown)

Meego wasn't a success in the end, since the project halted. Nokia never switched to Meego proper, being stuck in Harmattan and then just switched to Windows altogether.

It's not a bigger problem for Mer than it was for Meego. How many Meego handsets or tablets came out (not counting N9)? Right - practically none. OEMs aren't running to write Linux drivers for their devices thanks to Android. As some phrased it - Android is the best friend and the worst enemy:
http://lwn.net/Articles/504865/

So Mer is picking up where the Meego stopped, and is even in better position now than Meego was before.

Edited 2012-08-23 15:31 UTC

Nokia CEO was not succes.

N9 was profitable and got better reviews than iPhone. N95 got DESIGN award over iPad2 in GB. If that is not definition of success than I do not know what success is...

Nokia decision of halting MeeGo had noting to do with performance of MeeGo. In fact Nokia CEO publicly stated that such performance is irrelevant and that even with big success MeeGo will not be continued.

Some analyst calculated that if N9 was backed by sane CEO, and sold in every major Nokia market than Nokia would be on + just from revenues of Nokia handsets unit.

That is definition of cash success.

Only failure of MeeGo is that it happened to be launched under CEO who wanted to gain market share for other company. And you can hardly blame MeeGo for Nokia shareholders decisions.

I'm not talking about Nokia, I'm talking about Meego project which was too dependent on Nokia. That spelled its doom the moment Nokia's mood changed. Being so dependent on an unreliable supporter can't be called success. Mer was created to address this problem.

Edited 2012-08-23 21:33 UTC

You're living in fantasy world. Yes, evidently you have no idea what success means - it's certainly not about some fanboy reviews, or meaningless design award given to an absolutely fugly phone (but, coincidentally, ~made in the UK - where Nokia has/had major design & Symbian operations - the same place where the award you claim is located ...likely just a case of pompous hipster buddies). N9 never came close to returning the looong investment in it & its platform.

WebOS, RIM, Bada, all failing and/or losing momentum... if there's a place for third player, that's certainly MS with their resources and overall influence on the industry; if Nokia didn't want to be relegated to being just another Android oem (where they wouldn't be able to compete with vertically integrated Samsung, like like most present Android OEMs are unable), then MS was the only way.

Edited 2012-08-30 00:05 UTC

Meego was buggy, incomplete, and it took them many years to arrive even at such state (first releases essentially long before iPhone was even revealed, as Series 90 / Hildon / Maemo). Also, it failed to interest 3rd party devs. And you're quite selective in your choice of reviews - say, check out one from mobile-review.com

If you are really able to call that a big success ...you'd make a much less sane CEO than Elop; abandoning such project was a rational decision.

Why not? They have huge resources and unlikely to run out of names.

Yea, but for it to be a success, it kind of has to be actually, you know, properly released sometime and used by, you know, lots of people..

If you just restart all the time with different "visions", you'll never get there, and eventually the entire project will just quietly cease to exist.

Why not? They have huge resources and unlikely to run out of names. "

Maybe it's just that they're trying too hard. Maybe they should do the Google/Microsoft thing and just let their employees experiment with things to their heart's content, not concerned with failure since it doesn't cost as much.

Cozy up with Google and focus on supporting x86 Android.

Now THERE'S an idea! :-D

Seriously, every company trying to make their own silly little O.S...come on. It's much better to let the big boys at Google handle their established and already excellent Android O.S. and focus on making it work better on their hardware, instead of fighting a lost war.

After the Microsoft monopoly on the dektop, most companies don't want to repeat the same mistake with Google on mobile.
The Facebook phone = FB UI + Tizen + HTC phone for instance.
Other brands will follow the same model, almost like in the credit card biz.

Edited 2012-08-23 05:29 UTC

Why not? This is how the computing market used to be before everyone embraced MS-DOS and made Microsoft what it is today.

As much as I like Android, I surely don't want to have an Android only mobile ecosystem.

If I had to choose between a world with iOS, Android and WinP or only Android I would choose Android only. Because Android is opensource and any company can run away with it. I can't see how you can get the situation you have now, with desktop pcs where MS has a monopoly ,with Android.

ALREADY DONE.

All Intel care about is x86 manufactured by Intel to be sold.

They hoped that MeeGo could deliver, and it would if not for Nokia insane CEO (who physically blocked its customer base from buying MeeGo products). Other OEM where not so involved, so Intel went out into the world and found new one Samsung. Though Samsung have a bit different needs so Tizen was created.

I found the conclusion drawn to be off too. MeeGo, BB10, Tizen, all the first devices with a brand new OS delayed. The first device gives the overall first impression of the whole platform. Press and people are going to judge the whole strategy based on the first device. So, it is important to make it decend, to improve and make the momentum when the first device hits market huge. Later on updates are more or less sideline news but the first device will be a frontpage news with deep and long reviews. Better delay and polish rather then hurry up and lose in the long run.

For HTML5: That is really not the killer. This days all or at least most platforms support that. Even MeeGo N9 got a WebWidgets app that executes the latest, greatest HTML5 apps. WP8, Android Chrome and Opera all support that out of the box.

There are reasons why there are so less HTML5 apps, why there are no complex larger HTML apps. Its horrible to develop, maintain and use. It will improve without question but native apps are not going away. A recent platform supports more thrn HTML5 only. Tizen was or is(?) at that point more then once. The EFL support was removed but Tizen 1.0 was shipping with Qt. I have hopes they integrate Android API too offering an to Android compatible stack plus Qt like Jolla and BB10 do.

Edited 2012-08-23 05:41 UTC

The Tizen roadmap is very simple:
1) the release of E17
http://e17releasemanager.wordpress.com/
2) the webruntime must be improved:
http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html

HTML5 without a browser is a real paradigm shift imo

It remains to be seen.

Personally, I have already enough of HTML+CSS+JavaScript crap at work, trying to fit desktop concepts into browsers, each with its quirks, and always feeling alien to the desktop around them. Plus not taking any advantage of the available hardware resources. Yuck!

Native applications are the way to go, the web should only be used for communication protocols and documents.

OS app stores will be dead within 5 years imo

> But it's not the first [...] Localytics [...]
If anyone is interested, he can see more information in
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/08/paging-stats-p...

Read that too

There are also reasons why Smasung pursuing WinP7 is pure lunacy on behalf on Sammobile.

Why on earth are you talking about WP7? (except to troll of course).

The article talks about WP8, not WP7. And WP7 is declining in anticipation of WP8.

Because of two facts:
1) Article state that Samsung wants to win back Nokia dominated market. Nokia own 0% of WinP8 market so article must by talking about WinP7 market.

2) Article state that Samsung wants to win WinP market in H2 of 2012, and WinP8 will be only available in Q4, so socope is too large for just WinP8.

So in fact what I'm saying is that Samsung will ABANDON Windows Phone market till launch of Windows Phone 8, and then they still may be committed only partially. I'm saying that THERE IS NO MARKET TO WIN BACK and there will be no such thing for H2 of 2012.

Also note that I did stated that Samsung may be focusing on WinP8 more than WinP7 but they will not pursue it full untill 2013 at best. That is my message. Samsung and WinP in __any__ version in 2012y? RIDICULOUS.

Agreed, this post is complete BS.
I was shocked to read this on OS News btw

Samsung already sell WinP7 devices. Approximately 1 out of every 100 sold Samsung handset is powered by WinP7.

While 8 others are powered by Bada OS...

The official Tizen roadmap proves there's not even a delay:
http://download.tizen.org/misc/media/conference2012/tuesday/ballroo...

Tizen 2.0 release in December 2012, devices in 2013.
The Sammobile guys have never seen this roadmap imo

yep, but Tizen is not Samsung:
http://www.tizenassociation.org/en/

We'll have Tizen TVs (Panasonic), phones (Facebook phone, etc.), IVI (vehicles), many OEMs and operators. Time will tell.