Mer was a free and open-source software distribution, targeted at hardware vendors to serve as a middleware for Linux kernel-based mobile-oriented operating systems.

Zephyr is an attempt at creating a stack for use by other projects to be exploring lightweight, high-performance, next-generation UIs based on Mer, Qt5, QML Compositor and Wayland.

[11] Based on the Allwinner A20 SoC,[12] it would have a 7" multitouch display, run the Plasma Active user interface on top of Mer, and have a target price of about €200.

As of early July 2012, the Vivaldi had been set back, but a solution was "in the pipes", according to Plasma developer Aaron Seigo.

[15] Parallel to Sailfish OS by Jolla, Nemo Mobile is a community-driven operating system based on a Linux kernel, Mer, a GUI and diverse applications.

[20] In July 2012 Jolla, a Finnish company founded by former Nokia employees involved in MeeGo development, announced their work on a new operating system called Sailfish OS, which is based on MeeGo and Mer's core with added proprietary GUI and hardware implementation layers.

[24] Mer's initial aim to provide a completely free alternative to the Maemo operating system, which was able to run on Nokia Internet Tablets such as the N800 and N810 (collectively known as the N8x0 devices).

[28] This was again proven to be a problem after Intel, Samsung and the Linux Foundation announced they were going to create a new operating system called Tizen.

The APIs for third party application development are included, meaning that Qt, EFL, and HTML5 would be supported on the platform, and maybe even others if widely requested.