Having played around Moblin on my Eee PC for a while, I got more views on its GUI.
Moblin does have a really impressive boot and shutdown time, which triggered the frency among all major developers to try all sorts of optimization tricks to make boot faster. Faster boot is great, especially in the Netbook or MID market, where the machines are in general less powerful, and users are less patient. I hate to admit it, every time I see it boots, it puts a smile on my face ! I am just b----y overwhelmed by it, that I wanna switch it off and boot again ! Or do a restart maybe...
The GUI is fresh and promise to be the future star. So, what have I got to say here ? A few things. First one, Energy savings GUI has to be the area where Moblin or the future Meego got to sort out. Right now Moblin does not seem to have a comprehensive power management GUI for the user to tweak their machine to save energy. Maybe they are doing all the clever stuff in the background, but the users are not given much chance to interact. In the original Eee PC Xandros edition, they have rather impressive and well thought out power-saving features that let users switch mode (accroding to their situation) to either boost performance or conserve energy.
This should really be the first App (forget about the rest of the app store concept or what have you !) that the Moblin/Meego team got to strike it absolutely right ! Why ? Cos mobile users are obsessed with longer hours on the road, and the longer the better !! ASUS built that in from the word go, and people loved them for it. Unfortunately, such feature in Moblin is not apparent and not particularly easy to use, and the user really haven't a clue what's going on under the bonnet, unless they go digging for information about the topic. Yes, the battery meter is there, but that's about it ! To make life easy for the mobile users, they should be able to find all the stuff that they need on that page (since the Moblin team already dedicated a page) to let them clock up/down CPU, plus whatever to prolong the un-plugged time on the road. Having an icon here and there in the APPs page certainly does not cut it ! I mean, you use up a whole page of screen resources (rare commodity in these devices), yet the users still have to go search (all over the place in fact) for some apps to help cut down energy use just does not make sense !
On the software front, it looks like the strategy of Intel and Nokia now is to go their own way. So the tried and tested software bases are not the chosen path to go, and don't know if there will be any co-op down the road. The implication for users who would like to jump on the Meego/Moblin bandwagon is that : stand still for now, and wait for future appstore to materialize. Perhaps the design guy in both Corps said so ? Or perhaps they have something up their sleeve which would be out soon. In short, that needs to be beefed up. But the unfortunate thing is that the Corp guys made a decision to "unified" the SDK, which means frantic porting once again for the developers ... amid the fact that the first porting to the Moblin base have not even completed !! To potential users, this thing is just bizarre ! To someone who now already runs a certain apps on other OS, this is only going to put off his desire to try Moblin/Meego.
Do appreciate that the GUI is still in Beta, cos after a while, navigating around its GUI feels rather clumsy, as u have to use the mouse to go to Application "zone", and click, click and more clicks in order to get to the application you want to start. The front page can only house about 8 shortcuts, not easily configurable though... And when u use it for a prolonged period and u are getting a bit tired, the Apps start to feel a million miles away... Well, all these animation candies look nice, but when it comes to quick and dirty navigation to the App that you want on the road, it does not help. Other "thin clients" definitely feel more responsive and actually enable the users to get to the App faster.
Yes, cutting out the bloats in the boot process is admirable effort, but the GUI puts all the bloats back ! Which is most unfortunate. Well to be fair, Moblin feels fast if you compare it with Windows Vista, or Win7, but it feels fat among all the thriving thin linux distros.
So there you go, how fat or thin Meego would or could go is everyone's guess. I'd certainly love to see they make leaps from the Moblin/Meamo platform, and I could once again load it up in my Eee Pc when they are available; At this point in time however I have to reluctantly switch to another distro which, to all fairness, better addressed the above issues. And right now for practicality can't stay with Moblin although my sentiment wants to !!