Plasma Mobile (and Hildon, because I’m an N900 nostalgist) is IMHO essential from turning this from just a toy that engineers play with to something that could affect change by allowing you do daily drive these old phones. (Unfortunately, I have concerns with that - mobile hardware wasn’t on the same plateau desktop computing is.)
I’m one of the two maintainers for the N900 on pmOS, and you can bet that I’ll be working on polishing Hildon (and hopefully Plasma Mobile) on this sucker once we nail down some of the more fundamental functionality (e.g. telephony)!
I’ll seriously consider flashing the N900 and giving it another go, Unfortunately, the N900 is somewhat crippled by only having 256 MB RAM, (despite having 32 GB of flash - in 2009!) and I think there’s not a whole lot of ecosystem going on for Hildon nowadays. (Plasma Mobile is small, but will likely grow.)
Don’t quote me on this, but I think I have heard in the pmOS chat that Plasma Mobile will work on devices with 256MB of ram. One of the original Plasma Mobile demos was done on the N900 a few years back.
On a side note, I ran XFCE on mine with pmOS and another user had Sway going on Wayland. Mainly “just because we can”, though none of us are using those environments at the moment since most of our time is dedicated to further development of pmOS.
Hildon is just X11 though, so any of the qt/qml/gtk stuff being built for other environments can work there :)
Yeah, the RAM limits on the N900 are the only reason it’s not still my daily device, since web pages have mostly grown to require at least 1GB RAM to load :P
I have a Q5, but I’m unimpressed with BB10 as an OS. The UI feels only like a shallow clone of Maemo - it lacks the nuance that made it click to me. The Android runtime is also flaky and the ecosystem dead.
Silver linings though: It has a great Exchange client!
I wanted a Pandora when they were new, but I kinda lost my enthusiasm for GNU/Linux along the way. (I still kinda want one anyways, though.) The thing with the Pyra is that it’s more like a laptop or even the pre-N900 NITs - a WiFi based tiny “MID” or gaming thing. Cellular might be possible on Pyra now, but the form factor seems clumsy for a phone replacement.
They can still be had on ebay, bought mine from the US retailer about… 5 hears back. Probably gonna grab the Pyra when it drops, if only as a nice backup terminal and media device.
Well, I suppose it depends what you use a “phone” for. If you primarily make voice calls, it’s probably not for you (though with a bluetooth headset maybe even for that form factor matters less?)
For me, I’m mostly texting (well, XMPPing, really), some surfing, some ssh’ing
Plasma Mobile (and Hildon, because I’m an N900 nostalgist) is IMHO essential from turning this from just a toy that engineers play with to something that could affect change by allowing you do daily drive these old phones. (Unfortunately, I have concerns with that - mobile hardware wasn’t on the same plateau desktop computing is.)
I’m one of the two maintainers for the N900 on pmOS, and you can bet that I’ll be working on polishing Hildon (and hopefully Plasma Mobile) on this sucker once we nail down some of the more fundamental functionality (e.g. telephony)!
I’ll seriously consider flashing the N900 and giving it another go, Unfortunately, the N900 is somewhat crippled by only having 256 MB RAM, (despite having 32 GB of flash - in 2009!) and I think there’s not a whole lot of ecosystem going on for Hildon nowadays. (Plasma Mobile is small, but will likely grow.)
Don’t quote me on this, but I think I have heard in the pmOS chat that Plasma Mobile will work on devices with 256MB of ram. One of the original Plasma Mobile demos was done on the N900 a few years back.
On a side note, I ran XFCE on mine with pmOS and another user had Sway going on Wayland. Mainly “just because we can”, though none of us are using those environments at the moment since most of our time is dedicated to further development of pmOS.
Hildon is just X11 though, so any of the qt/qml/gtk stuff being built for other environments can work there :)
Yeah, the RAM limits on the N900 are the only reason it’s not still my daily device, since web pages have mostly grown to require at least 1GB RAM to load :P
I can live without telephony so long as the data modem works ;)
Totally understand. Anything to do with the modem on this thing is still under active debug/development!
For sure. Keep up the good work!
I’m very excited for a Hildon revival! I got my current device (Blackberry Q10) in part because the UI felt enough like Hildon to be familiar.
I have a Q5, but I’m unimpressed with BB10 as an OS. The UI feels only like a shallow clone of Maemo - it lacks the nuance that made it click to me. The Android runtime is also flaky and the ecosystem dead.
Silver linings though: It has a great Exchange client!
Yeah, I’m desperate to replace my Q10 with a Pyra!
I wanted a Pandora when they were new, but I kinda lost my enthusiasm for GNU/Linux along the way. (I still kinda want one anyways, though.) The thing with the Pyra is that it’s more like a laptop or even the pre-N900 NITs - a WiFi based tiny “MID” or gaming thing. Cellular might be possible on Pyra now, but the form factor seems clumsy for a phone replacement.
They can still be had on ebay, bought mine from the US retailer about… 5 hears back. Probably gonna grab the Pyra when it drops, if only as a nice backup terminal and media device.
Well, I suppose it depends what you use a “phone” for. If you primarily make voice calls, it’s probably not for you (though with a bluetooth headset maybe even for that form factor matters less?)
For me, I’m mostly texting (well, XMPPing, really), some surfing, some ssh’ing