There is one big problem in the Linux (or also in the open source
community) - a never-ending reinventing of wheel. It is the most visible
in the area of handheld and mobile systems. It is normal than an existing,
perfeclty usefull application is replaced by a new one, which has 1/10
of functionalities (and often a similar level of stability) but it uses
a more modern GUI library or something like that. After some time is
is also replaced a more modern one which uses even never GUI libraries.
One of the typical examples is a calendar application: there was something
in the GPE environment (a nice one, actually) and it was even ported
to NOkia Internet Tablet line. On the OpenMoko phones the calendar was
written from scratch (in the SHR, at least). The Qt-based competitors
(the QTopia, the Opie) had their own calendar (not a bad one, too).
On the Ubuntu Touch there is a new one: with a
limited configurability, poor week and month views and so. It is much
worse than both the GPE one and the QTopia one.
It is better not to mention that no one of them is comparable with 20+
years old Dates application from the Palm OS. It was faster, more
user-friendly and easier to use than all mentioned above (OK, the GPE
one was pretty close to it - and it was pretty colorfull).
But recently I had problems with much more basic thingy: the brand new
Calculator on the Ubuntu Touch is broken. Even when it worked it was
less capable than most of older ones (it was not better than the
30+ years old XCalc). Recently I played with the old and abandoned
EasyCalc for the Palm OS. It is much more advanced than most of the
contemporary calculators! And it runs in much more limited environment
than they have to do (I think that the GCalcTool is comparable - but
it also does not run on modern Linux devices...). Well, I actually use
more often the old good Elektronika MK-52 than any calculator application
on a tablet/phone but sometimes it is not available and I have to use
such thing...
