Saturday, June 13, 2009

Mer: Comparison with desktop distributions

Comes from a presentation of mer community.

Is Mer just yet another linux distribution? Many people would disagree since we break quite a lot of things (Maemo GTK is a big one!), and I'll tell you some of the ways we differ.

Like Maemo we focus on power saving, some things that make sense on desktop/laptop distributions simply doesn't make sense on mobile devices that's supposed to last on the same charge several days being always­connected.

A tablet still comes with limited storage space, so there might be a need to shrink packages or dependancies (why do we need a weather library for NetworkManager?); but not hard as on an embedded system; there's miles difference between 256m flash and 64mb flash.

Yes, you can't run Crysis on a tablet, it has CPU, memory and bandwidth constraints and apps should be suited towards that. But, what it can do is to be more powerful because of the environment and services surrounding it.

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