Originally Posted by Tomaszd

For those tl;dr types: Focus on hardware support first, then on the software.

I wanted to share this on #mer, but I think a longer, more organised rant is in order.

Disclaimer: I'm involved in Mer, quite a bit. From managing translations, patching the N8x0 kernel, to packaging and porting apps from Diablo (Pidgin, Tear). I never planned to do this, but it really is fun and rewarding. I think the community is what is making this project rock, even if few people are directly involved in it (yes, we need you!).

My main concern is feature parity with Diablo. I don't want history to repeat itself. Let me explain.

I used to be involved in another project (won't name names), which also aimed at being a replacement of a well estabilished, commercial one. Unfortunately, the developers were not interested in getting feature-parity first, they were only interested in experimentation and technology previews that eventually went nowhere and have been discarded or simply abandoned.

Eventually people who were testing this product got frustrated, and rightfully so. The product couldn't have been used full time, because the essential, basic needs were not met. No-one wanted to test the product's superfeatures, because it was just painful. Every time they complained the developers would jump out with another experiment, and people would eat it up. This went on for years. Eventually everyone lost faith, it was clear the project would never achieve its goals.

This little anecdote is an attempt to draw some parallels with Mer to avoid such a dismal situation.

We need sound working perfectly and out of the box on the NITs, so that people actually use Mer for more than five seconds. Mer shouldn't be degraded to just another toy.

Currently, enabling sound is a painful process and sound works rather terribly. I refuse to "eat my own dogfood", because I'm not going to use a crippled system.

We need the GPS to work out of the box on the NITs, instead of a huge wiki page with instructions on how to enable it. With GPS we can then port Maemo Mapper, Carman and other cool Maemo applications that would attract users.

We obviously need to support the LEDs, the light sensor and the camera as well. And have an event manager to handle things like popping the camera out on the N800 or sliding out the keyboard on the N810 (+handle its backlight).

Also, we should not ship with showstopping bugs which prevent Mer from booting randomly.

Then, only then can we focus on software, on porting more apps, on sprucing up the interface. Mer is going to be just an irrelevant toy if we don't get these things done, no matter how beautiful we make it with those fvwm scripts.

Having full hardware support, few apps and a bare interface is much better than the opposite situation. A lot more people can get involved, to develop apps for it and test it. Hardware support is really low-level stuff that few people understand. Reporting bugs of a media player is easy, but not being able to actually use a media player and thus not have any bugs to report is a shame.

Now you see how much really needs to be done. That's why we need your help!