It's things like page layout, margins, bleeds, printer profiles, support for printer features... Adding proper printing support could easily take six months, even if Qt already supports the basics. And then it still wouldn't be on Scribus' level.

I actually like the feel of my M1 pro keyboard better than my 1015 15" macbook pro's keyboard. But... That weird lcd strip constantly flickering in the periphery of my vision makes me want to throw the laptop out of the window. Good thing it isn't my main working machine, just a device to make fat binaries of Krita on.

I worked there -- as an outside consultant -- quite a few times. It was a pretty ordinary, meh, office building. What I remember most vividly was sitting there in the office with two Nokia people, one quite senior, when the N8 was released, and seeing them watching the release video with lots of excitement -- until they realized the darn thing was running _symbian_. Everyone in the Maemo group thought it was (going to be) running Maemo -- every single engineer!

I had a wonderful time, but what a broken company...

Feels like every person working in the building was a consultant. (different coloured badges iirc)

There was an anecdote being sent around about how it "was the most expensive clock application ever to exist" due to rewrites.

I agree, lots of great people working there, but I think very little leadership.

All this wibbling about GNOME 3 and so on -- it's just not relevant to the data in the original article. The same thing happened to KDE at the time.

The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous.

And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012.

By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.

That explains KDE's decline (Nokia owned Qt), but not Gnome.

Yes, it does, because Nokia had its fingers in both bowls of porridge, to the extent where people like Michael Meeks were fighting really hard to keep a small library like kcalendar out of Maemo.

Nokia started with GTK and when they went to Qt, they never stopped their involvement with GTK/GNOME -- they seemed to have expected the idiots in both camps to just work together for the good of free software, and like the idiots we were, we didn't.

Good grief, the painful conversations we had after the Dublin MeeGo conf ended, between people from both camps...

I was there; I wrote code; I had employees, I went to the various conferences and trade shows. My company provided one of the default apps on the N9...

> Nokia started with GTK and when they went to Qt

Did they ever actually get to this point? I understand it was the long term plan but the only MeeGo phones actually released by nokia were still GTK based.

What are your thoughts on the Pinephone?

What would a reasonable goal for success look like? How can it be achieved? What would cause it to fail?

It's not going to replace the enormous investment Nokia made into the free software/linux community... So it won't help the graphs the original article showed. But by another measure, it's already a success since it exists.

My Nokia N9 is still the greatest phone UI I’ve ever used. I wish Microsoft hadn’t killed Nokia.

Or you know, the general decline of desktops from "the only computing" to "secondary computing after mobile".

No... It really just is the sudden drop of investment by Nokia and Intel. All those extra contributors were hires working on Maemo and Meego.

How do you explain the relative neglect happening at Microsoft and Apple, then? Or Mono -> Xamarin?

The market just shifted. If you remember, there were also efforts by Mozilla with Mozilla OS, Ubuntu with Unity, everyone and their cat was focusing on mobile.

It doesn't mean a translation: it means the original text, its variants with commentary. Basically, it's what you'd use to make a new translation. Or to read for pleasure, if you can read ancient Greek -- which I can't, I never got beyond the Anabasis.

The thing is, of course, that you don't need to trust the Qt Company. That's why we have the KDE-Free Qt foundation, and that alone makes Qt the best choice for anyone who developers software that can use LGPL libraries, commercial or open source.

Weird, last time I noticed Qt being discussed on HN, I got a really useful and technical comment which is still something I'm basing my future plans on.

You can't say that and then not link the comment!

Weird, can you link it?

Even Autodesk, which uses Qt for pretty much all its products, including Maya, doesn't pay a cent for Qt. Same with The Foundry. As soon as Nokia made LGPL licensed python bindings for Qt, they dropped PyQt, stopped paying or contributing, and just went on freeloading.

"They cast steel in fires that couldn’t possibly be hot enough in our physics."

That's not because of fantasy elements; it's because the author didn't do his research, and instead just went with what he'd seen in countless movies.

Yes. Everything was painted, and to modern eyes, as gaudily as possible.

> as gaudily as possible.

We don't actually know that. We know more or less what pigments were used but not how artistically it was applied. The gaudy reconstructions are made by scientists, nor artists. Not many paintings have survived from antiquity, but the ones we have does not strike me as gaudy.