Thoughtfulness makes for success: ubuntu vs maemo

So I am now dealing with two versions of linux. ubuntu on my laptop & maemo on nokia 770. As I said before, I have my grudges with ubuntu but, they are minor.

On the other hand, most things with maemo have turned out to be painful. There is support for a development environment called scratchbox that lets you develop on the linux desktop but cross compile or retarget the applications for the 770. Installing that proved to be a pain - the installer failed at almost the last step; scratchbox seems to also mount the file system with circular dependencies, so if you try to delete the directory without stopping a service (bear in mind that you dont even know that such a service gets started; and the installation instructions tell you to blow away the directory to reinstall/upgrade from a previous version!), you end up corrupting the file system - the script to stop the service gets deleted, but the /scratchbox directory is not because of the circular dependencies.

Then, I tried developing on the tiny 770 itself. Installing python failed - there were complaints about version incompatibilities in apt-get. There is no standard set of apt repositories, so one does not know where to fetch the software from. This, despite python being the "most supported" development language for the 770.

Perhaps the biggest indictment is this: the 770 is purported to be targeted at hackers. But it does not come with an xterm installed! The input via keyboard or handwriting support on the tiny device is difficult, not surprisingly. And ssh is not installed by default; installing that takes a few steps.

Contrast that with ubuntu which has a comprehensive /etc/apt/sources.list, that I almost never had to modify. Perhaps the biggest difference in the maemo-ubuntu approaches is the thoughtfulness put into ubuntu - Each application is carefully selected to be good enough for most people; so people wont spend tons of time downloading the basic application. There is a comprehensive, well maintained repository for people who want to explore further. With google, there is community support for virtually every problem I have encountered. The discussion forum of ubuntu are more readable than the IRC archives of maemo questions - perhaps because people have to think and respond to a discussion post, rather than shoot an off-the-cuff response on an IRC channel (plus, the conversation can be threaded by replies, and you wont have some clown posting something totally irrelevant between the time the question and the reply).

I just saw the ads for iPhone. The thoughtfulness that has been gone into it is amazing - two things strike my mind: when you flip the phone from landscape to portrait mode, the display adjusts itself. And you can flip through your album list using the cd covers - the spines are displayed in a row from left to right and front of the current album is displayed in the centre. Look at how natural it is to do the intended applications of the iPhone, vs. the same for 770.