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Can Not (it is fundamentally the same as Meego). There isn't a major problem with its arch other than the fact that it is old and unmaintained and incompatible with the modern meego specs.For application development it is fine, but as a finished and hardened product, No.

Is there even system wide support for rotation, a modern kernel, recent X?

I agree that it is unmaintained, but "old" is a very relative word. Debian can easily bridge package version gaps far larger than ~1 year.

Then you have people using lower level frameworks that bring issues when using higher level frameworks. Fundamentally things will run on both, but there is breakage between distros especially at lower level userspace.

Please, do provide specific examples. My experience is that I've ported many years old and unmaintained software to newer systems with a mere recompile (if the binary didn't just work out of the box anyway), even between fundamentally different operating systems (Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc.). If you plan ahead and don't tie yourself to too many platform specific features, porting becomes relatively trivial.

There is also a serious issue having two frameworks and telling developers "here start with this, it is old and unmaintained and just wait for the new hotness to come in bits and pieces" or "here use this, we will be replacing it soon so watch out". This has the potential to create huge fragmentation, magnitudes worse than what is seen in android. Ultimately they aren't aiming for an n900 where most of the community are developers, they want a consistent product or none at all.

Well, depends on what you consider to be "soon" and Gtk support can clearly be marked as legacy and/or deprecated, much in the same way Apple had supported Carbon on OSX, even though Cocoa was the right way to do it. Clearly it can be done.

Also I have a particular problem with the "we want customers, not developers" attitude that many companies exhibit. They assume they are in it alone and that they ship a closed and boxed product that you throw away after having used it more or less without modification. This was true for dumb and feature phones, but not at all for smart phones. With smart phones, people don't just want the "out of the box" experience, they download software, modify settings and often do crazy things with their hardware. That's the difference between platform and ecosystem. The aforementioned attitude is exactly what got Nokia into this mess.

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