> Nokia N900 was a beautiful, functional thing running linux and Free software 10 years ago.

All my horses on this being the #1 reason why Microsoft panicked and pushed Nokia into a partnership that ultimately forced Nokia to sell its mobile business to Microsoft, which of course meant the end of Linux in those devices.

I picked up an N900 for next to nothing as-is. The charging port was damaged (but that wasn’t really an issue, this was when you could swap batteries so I just kept two with an external charger) and the software was... damaged. For some reason a lot of packages were broken or removed. Not sure what the previous owner did.

But I didn’t really care. No calculator? No problem, I just fired up Vim while I was bored in class and wrote my own. Contacts book would crash? Again, a simple program I wrote let me quickly grep through a CSV file and add/update/call people.

It was such a joy to use I would carry it around even though I ended up using an iPhone as my daily driver.

Also kudos to the scene in Die Hard 4.0 showing off Linux/Maemo at the time.

The N900 was my dream device, and the prototype of the latest model still is on eBay for ridiculous price ranges.

I wish the pinephone would be exactly like the N900, but with better CPU specs.

> but with better CPU specs.

I would, on the other hand, leave the CPU as it is, and welcome any change to battery life. That's the only factor preventing me from using one as a daily driver.

I never had the N900, but I used the N9 as my primary phone until the SIM holder broke and I had to hold the SIM in to make a call.

Looking at the comparison[1], it looks like the N9 was a bit more advanced, but it lacked the keyboard the N900 had. At least I also had a N97 :)

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=3398&idPhone2...

tell me more?

It had a well-polished Linux-based OS, developed in-house by Nokia. Excellent hardware for the time, and a keyboard which was a delight to use. It got pretty decent reviews - even outside of the Linux fanboy bubble.

It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.

> Maemo Leste is an operating system currently in development. It is a modernised and liberated version of Maemo 5, rebased on top of Devuan with a mainline Linux kernel. The first operating system images were released in February 2018.

> It is currently in a usable state with support for various targets such as the N900, Motorola Droid 4 and the PinePhone.

Neat!

I mean, Android is mostly Linux. I don't think the kernel is the issue. The issue with librem is that they put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software.

The point is that the n900 was Gnu/Linux with glibc like mama said was good for you and worked along very similar lines to your desktop machine.

Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc.

But who cares that stuff?

It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was.

Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.

The N900 was everything a portable device should be. Really sad that it was a dead end

Not really, in what concerns application developers.

Only the Java/Kotlin userspace and the small set of NDK libraries are considered official and stable.

Anyone that ventures outside this path and isn't an OEM doing their own Android distribution, is on their own if the application actually works at all when deployed via the PlayStore, as the Termux guys eventually found out.