meego

Tizen is interesting, but it has the downside of the old Meego - too much control from Samsung.

But just as Meego was announced, Intel had moved from Moblin v1 (deb) to Moblin v2 (rpm).

When Nokia and Intel pulled the plug, Meego disintegrated and only community fork (Mer) survived, on which Sailfish is actually built.

The phone was perhaps amazing, but Meego the project was all over the place.

What makes little sense is to start again, mostly from scratch (or from MeeGo or its successor, which is basically from scratch).

As you used MeeGo, how does Sailfish OS appear to compare with it?

Yes, but Symbian development was spinning up again, MeeGo had an amazing potential.

I'm still upset by the fact that MeeGo/Maemo was killed, and Nokia sold to Microsoft.

I don't think I will buy one now but I really wanted a MeeGo device.

Yeah, my poor blosxom instance running on an ancient ideapad I got for free at a meego conference in Dublin isn't made for loads like ycombinator causes.

But the truth is that Symbian had simply been stagnant for too long and would never catch up and MeeGo for all its potential was just another platform with even less backing than WP and even less ready to be sold.

For that money, they got multiple infighting operating system teams each developing their own half-baked thing (Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, S40) and device teams that were building uncompetitive devices on top of 3-year-old software.

I'm a bit torn on that, since switching away from "Webby" interface basically killed Fennec for Meego, and only Android started getting UI improvements (that's what triggered a separate browser for Sailfish to begin with).

Meego became Mer on which Sailfish is based, and it has enough users, so your argument is invalid.

Nokia was on its way with the N700-N9/Maemo-Meego series, and afterwards with Nokia X.

Qt was bought in part to attempt to bridge Maemo/Meego and Symbian.