Moblin is different. If there’s one phrase that sums up what I’ve been trying to do with the last six months or so it’s that. After all, all of the stuff that’s out there right now already exists. Doing the same thing again does not create a compelling reason for people to use your software.

So we set about putting our money where our mouth was and started building something. Starting today you can see where we’ve got to so far with the beta release of the Moblin 2.0 for Netbooks User Experience. Just go to moblin.org, download it, burn it onto a nearby USB stick and you can either just run it live or install it to pretty much any netbook with an Atom chip. I think you’ll like it.

During this project I’ve had the good fortune to work with a whole group of people whose immense technical skills, personal charm and good humour I respect and admire wholeheartedly. Everything that is good about or project is there because they envisioned, supported or improved it in countless ways. Most of these people will not be mentioned in press releases so I’d like to take a moment to thank as many of them as I can personally for making this last little while the most thrilling, tiring and satisfying period of my professional life. So thanks (in no particular order) to: Darren Wilson, Claire Alexander, Hylke Bons, Matthew Alum, Ross Burton, Tomas Frydrych, Mark Skarpness, Paul Cooper, Øyvind ‘Pippin’ Kolås, Michael Meeks, Srini Ragavan, Chris Lord, Neil Roberts, Rob Bragg, Cyrene Domogalla, Jason Casseza, Arjan van den Ven, Anas Nashif, all the guys and girls in PRC QA, Iain Holmes, Damien Lespiau, Josh Lock, Jussi Kukkonen, Patrick Ohly, Thomas Wood, Emmanuele Bassi, Geoff Gustafson, Robert Staudinger, Sharon Murphy and of course, Rob Bradford. Thanks guys, I really couldn’t have done it without you. It’s been fun but it doesn’t end here.

We’re going to continue iterating this platform to knock off as many of the sharp edges as possible (we’re well aware that there’s quite a few) and continue taking our design philosophy to other platforms. Now that our UI is public and properly open source we’d love to chat. I hope you enjoy it.

Love,

Nick