Guest post by There are a lot of WebOS fans out there who regret this remarkable operating system got shelved by HP just as Android was swooping in to win the hearts and minds of developers. Is there still hope? WebOSNation reports they’ve got it running on Google hardware. Surely a little competition for Android isn’t a bad thing?
In the past couple of weeks I have used ubuntu, plasma active and now I’ll give web os a spin.
So far plasma active has been the closest to android for me but is still ridiculously unstable. I always wanted to try web os so this should be fun.
Just got a nexus 7 for Christmas and looking to try non-android on it. So forgive the barrage of questions, but if you have time, I’d be interested in the answers.
Which OS has made it work the best for you?
What are your usecases with the nexus 7?
Does each OS seem to pertain to specialize in a particular use case, or are they all pretty much the same at doing everything?
Have you spent any time developing apps for any/all of them? What was the experience like?
–PS Doesn’t this seem like what OS News should be like? Trying out different Operating systems/ UI’s on different hardware it was never really meant to be on?
Edited 2013-01-02 18:50 UTC
If you want to use your nexus i would stay with android. Right now there really isn’t a distro that is stable enough for me.
If you’re comfortable flashing roms, by all means try them out but if you intend on using your nexus regularly stick with cyanogenmod.
I do intend to use it regularly, by trying out different operating systems/roms on it. Probably will end up going back to android, not sure yet. It would be fun to hack on something like mer. It *sounds* like they have a decent dev kit. Of course, I’ll find out one way or the other. I’m fully expecting it to have the battery life of my first laptop ~1 hour or so. The real goal of my experimentation with the tablet is experimentation, but If I stumble upon a really nice productivity environment that allows the device to be efficiently used as a content creation device, well all the much better.
There is even a project (that actually has a alpha release) developed by Phoenix International communications that give you the ability to install WebOS as an Android app.
I looked at buying a HP tablet when they were fire selling them just to play around with WebOS, but it looks like my wise decision to buy a Nexus 7 (after the initial revisions with hardware issues) has paid off in this regard.
Keep in mind that open webos is at the hardware enablement stage and is very feature incomplete after what proprietary things were stripped out.
Here’s a list of what’s missing:
http://m.webosnation.com/whats-missing-open-webos-10-nothing-cant-b…
What webos really needs(apart from hardware to run) is synergy services for google, yahoo, and the like to sync contacts calendar and mail. Without it, webos is very isolated from the web.
Don’t both of Android and WebOS run on the Linux kernel?
I hope things converge later on down the road and a common set of APIs are chosen.
If everything targeted Wayland then would it be trivial getting Ubuntu to run on a phone, or Android to run on a computer?
Isn’t the reason there is so much work here because the vendors provide Android graphics drivers and not X or Wayland? It would be nice if everything spoke the same language.
Please excuse me if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.