The problem with maemo (and meego in a way too)

I've been a happy user of both the original Nokia 770 tablet, the N810 and N900. From the point of view of a normal user I've been very happy with all of them, they have done what they promised and as a user I don't have that much to complain about. But..

As a developer I was drawn to the original tables as it was gobject/gtk+/gnome based with no bloat of C++ or some java stuff.
Made it easy to create software and somewhat easy to support both desktop and tablets in the same software, with some ifdeffing for maemo specific parts (gtk/hildon). That was more or less working in 2007-2008, but currently it's a blody mess.
Trying to support Gregale, Diablo, Fremantle and normal desktop gnome in the same app is these days such a pain that I've almost lost interest to do anything at all (one reason for Mapper developing at a snail pace currently).
Even Fremantle, that should use the latest technologies, (and Diablo) is stuck in the stone ages, gtk is in the 2.10 series (3-4 yeras old) Gregale is even worse with 2.6. Same with glib. Then we have gnome-vfs and gio mess.
And tablets specific Hildon changes, 3 almost compatible versions. Then we have 3-4 different UI styles to support.

And now upstream gtk+ is moving to version 3.0 and GNOME applications should move over to it. GConf is going to be deprecated with GSetting/dconf.

Now what the fuck are you supposed to do as developer wanting to support all tablets and desktop in the same app?

Cute laptops and silly reviews

I'm planning on getting myself one of those cute small laptops, an Asus Eee PC 901 or MSI Wind. Trying to decide witch one to get is hard, so I've been reading reviews here and there.
Anyway, the text on this site is... I don't if it's funny or if I should cry or what.. "With 1GB of RAM in support you can even have two or three programs open at any one time and not encounter any major problems unless you want to watch video, in which case it's best to close other programs - particularly memory heavy apps like Firefox and OpenOffice."

How come you suddenly need terabytes of memory to do something ? I've typing this on a laptop with 256MB of memory (with 32MB dedicated to the crappy integrated S3 Savage), running Firefox, Evolution, Pidgin, Empathy and couple of terminals on a GNOME desktop. And in the background there is mysql, postgresql and apache. Ok, I do have 210MB of swap in use, but that's still way under 1GB of memory.

Sigh.. I miss the good old days when 8MB was enough to run just about anything.