The Exynos 4 is actually pretty recent tech. Once again I am tempted to design my own phone from scratch....

Kontact. Admittedly, Kmail's interface is a bit lacking compared to Thunderbird, but Kontact's killer feature is that it has email, an address book, personal organizer, and RSS reader, all of which you can sync across multiple devices if you run Kolab on a server. If you want access to all that information across multiple devices, you either have to put your data in the cloud, use a commercial solution, or use a varied collection of different programs.

Thanks for that post. It's rare to see people bringing balance to the conversation by offering perspectives like that here. We need more of it.

That's not what open source means.

The Japanese have a word for this - karoshi.

Same goes for us down in Australia. I've had great experiences with Amazon and bought a bunch of books from them recently, but it's virtually impossible to find electronics that ship outside the US on there.

No, these were the projections accounting for the UI Formerly Known as Metro. They just underestimated how bad it would be.

Why, that sounds almost as if they would be held accountable for their actions, to the extent that it might actually be disadvantageous to break the law...

The very reason it's a clusterfuck is because of the fragmentation these guys are trying to address. Each device has a different kernel, even those that use the same SoC (because the GPIOs, etc. are hardcoded). That means that the developers efforts are fragmented - only a small number of people see the bugs and put in the effort to fix them, which undermines Linus' law. 3.7 will help, but there's still a lot to be done before ARM has the kind of compatibility that x86 does.

tldr: These guys are doing useful, important work that will vastly improve the state of Linux ARM.

Citation needed. According to wikipedia, Linaro was only founded 2 years ago.

This is also true in other Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, Canada, etc.

KDE is hardly an alternative desktop - it has more in common with Gnome (in terms of popularity) than XFCE.

There's a difference between premature optimization and software bloat. I can see absolutely no reason one program should take up 2+ orders of magnitude more resources than a competing product with 90% of the features.

Once upon a time there was an idea to target both phones and tablets - what happened to that? It seems like they're only concentrating on tablets now.
-someone who was really looking forward to running KDE on his phone

Here's a useful reference point: I ordered one from both element14 and RS at the same time. The RS one arrived several weeks after the one from element14. I ordered another one from element14 more recently, and it arrived in under 3 weeks.

AFAICT, most of the people complaining ordered theirs from RS. I suspect part of the reason may be that RS is using a completely separate website and therefore likely has a completely separate administrative process for fulfilling orders, which isn't as capable. Element14 just added them as items to their regular site, so they aren't subject to the same limitations. (I'd say that was a pretty good move on their part, given that I've since ordered lots of more obscure components from them.)