MeeGo scales, because Linux scales

To me, and a lot of people, it’s obvious why MeeGo scales to a wide variety of devices, but apparently that’s not clear to other people, so I’ll try to explain why that’s the case.

First, let’s divide the operating system:

1. Kernel
2. Drivers
3. Adaptation
4. System Frameworks
5. Application Framework
6. Applications

“Linux” can mean many things, in the case of Android, Linux means mostly the Kernel (which is heavily modified), and in some cases the Drivers (although sometimes they have to be written from scratch), but all the layers above are specific to Android.

On Maemo, MeeGo, Moblin, and LiMo, “Linux” means an upstream Kernel (no drastic changes), upstream Drivers (which means they can be shared with other upstream players as they are), but also means “Linux ecosystem”; D-Bus, X.org, GStreamer, GTK+/Qt/EFL, etc. Which means they take advantage of already existing System and Application Frameworks. And all they have to do, is build the Applications, which is not an easy task, but certainly easier than having to do all the previous ones.

Now, the problem when creating MeeGo, is that for reasons I won’t (can’t?) explain here, Maemo and Moblin were forced to switch from GTK+ to Qt. This might have been the right move in the long term, but it means rewriting two very big layers of the operating system, in fact, the two layers that differentiate the various mobile platforms for the most part. And this of course means letting go of a lot of talent that helped build both Maemo and Moblin.

For better or worse, the decision was made, and all we could do is ride along with it. And maturizing MeeGo, essentially means maturizing these two new layers being written not entirely from scratch (as Qt was already there), but pretty much (as you have to add new features to it, and build on top).

Now, did MeeGo fail? Well, I don’t know when this UI can be considered mature enough, but sooner or later, it will be (I do think it will be soon). The timeframe depends also on your definition of “mature”, but regardless of that, it will happen. After that, MeeGo will be ready to ship on all kinds of devices. All the hardware platform vendors have to do, is write the drivers, and the adaptation, and they already do anyway for other sw platforms.

Needless to say, the UI is irrelevant to the hardware platform.

So, here’s the proof that the lower layers are more than ready:

Just after a few months of announcing MeeGo IVI, these guys were able to write a very impressive application thanks to QML, and ignore the official UI.

The OMAP4 guys went for the full MeeGO UI. No problems.

Even though Freescale is probably not that committed to MeeGo, it’s easier to create demo using it (Qt; Nomovok) rather than other platforms. It’s even hardware accelerated.

Renesas also chose the Nomovok demo to show their hardware capabilities.

MeeGo 1.1 running on HTC’s HD2

One guy; yes, one guy. Decides to run MeeGo on his HTC, and succeeds. Of course, he uses the work already done by Ubuntu for HD2, but since MeeGo is close to upstream, the same kernel can be used. Sure, it’s slow (no hardware acceleration), and there’s many things missing, but for a short amount of time spent by hobbyists, that’s pretty great already.

This is one is not so impressive, but also shows the work of one guy porting MeeGo to Nexus S

And running on Archos 9. Not very impressive UI, but the point is that it runs on this hw.

Conclusion

So, as you can see MeeGo is already supported in many hardware platforms; not because the relevant companies made a deal with Nokia or Intel; they don’t have to. The only thing they have to do is support Linux; Linux is what allows them to run MeeGo, and Linux is what allows MeeGo to run on any hardware platform.

This is impossible with WP7 for numerous reasons; it’s closed source, it’s proprietary, it’s Microsoft, etc. It’s not so impossible to do the same with Android, but it’s more difficult than with MeeGo because they don’t share anything with a typical linux ecosystem; they are on a far away island on their own.