Plasma Mobile aims to become a complete and open software system for mobile devices. It is designed to give privacy-aware users back the full-control over their information and communication. Plasma Mobile takes a pragmatic approach and is inclusive to 3rd party software, allowing the user to choose which applications and services to use. It provides a seamless experience across multiple devices. Plasma Mobile implements open standards and it is developed in a transparent process that is open for the community to participate in.
Great presentation on the website, but the product itself clearly has a long way to go. You can try it out on a Nexus 5 or a OnePlus One.
It’s cool that this exists, but I wonder what the goal is. If they’re building this because it’s fun to do so, that’s a completely valid reason. But I wonder if they have a plan to try to get users because it’s hard to see how that would be possible beyond a few “nerds”. If they’re building it because it’s fun I hope they have some novel ideas and it doesn’t end up like a clone of every other mobile OS.
I worked on this full-time in the first half of 2015. My involvement ended with presenting the results at Akademy 2015. It was a fun, though sometimes frustrating project. Basically, we took Ubuntu Phone and removed mir and unity, and added wayland and plasma. It works surprisingly well for something basically created by two, three people.
We did have some goals other than seeing whether it would be possible or having fun: absolute respect for your privacy and complete hackability by the owner of the device.
That’s something we delivered, but last year at least, it wasn’t ready to use day-in day-out, and that seemed unlikely to be achievable.
That’s really cool. It must have been a really fun project to work on. Nice work!
Brilliant work.
Plasma (KDE in general) was for me until a few days ago a beautiful-but-not-really-working thing probably still remembering the early days of Plasma. Then a few days ago I got a 4k monitor and suddenly realized that hidpi support in Linux desktop environments is primitive unless you can use that Unity monstrosity.
Then after trying every possible hack for Cinnamon/Gnome3 I was so “desperate” that I said let’s try KDE might work these days.
And oh boy does it work. Proper UI scaling steps (no xrandr hacks). Still beautiful but now also fast and usable. The abundance of configuration options is still there but in a good way. And the bigger surprise of all: Scaling GTK2 and GTK3 apps works better with Plasma than it did with GTK based desktop environments. There I can really understand how it is possible to have this beautiful environment scaled down to a small mobile screen.
What is the problem with Unity? Even though I prefer Cinnamon, my second option is Unity. I don’t see why you think it is a “monstrosity”.
First of all everything in this topic is subjective, so I’ll not try to convince anyone but here are the reasons I belive it is a monstrosity
– Fixed window title buttons to the left side because “we devs know better”
– The panel on the left which can only be moved down
– the global application menu which of course you CA disable but….
… The effort to lock out customizations for the end user is so obvious that you are not sure if in the next version the feature you love will still be there.
So the actual monstrosity from my point of view is not the UI but the mentality behind Unity.
Gnome3 works fairly well with HiDPI for me (13″ 2560×1440). In fact, it was the main reason why I went with Gnome on my laptop, as KDE wasn’t, at the time.
EoG upscaling images sucks, though. It seems to be fixed now, but not quite. It’s not pixellated, as it used to be, but it renders slighly differently from Gwenview.
I should try KDE again.
For me, those goals are important enough that I am willing to put up with some inconvenience, at least while the project matures. I am a “nerd”, of course, but the upside of that is that I will be happy to contribute to the project once I am a user. Now all I have to do is get one of the supported devices…
Could you go more into detail on the whole “absolute respect for your privacy” aspect?
Was that a soft respect for privacy as in ” The operating system and the default applications will not abuse your privacy”
Or the more interesting, hard core respect for privacy:
“No application ever installed may abuse your privacy”
I’d love to have both kinds of privacy, but I think I need the latter more than the former. I tend to trust larger more well known companies than Joe’s Discount App Warehouse.
Edited 2016-11-04 16:34 UTC
I don’t want to disparage the accomplishment but just comment that the KDE aesthetic has always (I’ve been on linux full time since 1999) seemed really ugly to me. Even when KDE supposedly became beautiful to many, I still just always preferred Gnome (and almost anything else) to KDE *only* because it seemed ugly to me. This shines through in this project also.
Has there been a single design leader behind KDE since the beginning? If so I really think they should consider bringing in new people to break out of that rut.
Thank you for saying it, as it needed to be said
“Has there been a single design leader behind KDE since the beginning? If so I really think they should consider bringing in new people to break out of that rut.”
No.
Or, as they say, beauty is on the eye of the beholder.
While KDE may not be as beautiful as, say, OS X used to be a few years ago (current iterations have gone down the drain as far as looks are concerned IMHO) it still remains as the best looking DE on Linux to me. Although I must confess that I am not too fond of all the “flattening” that is taking place on Plasma and KDE right now…
And while GNOME has become somewhat easy on the eyes since GNOME 3, I can safely state that I wouldn’t be using Linux as a daily driver if it were the only game in town.
Different strokes for different folks.
Thats just so crazy to me. I don’t choose my tools based on their appearance, but by their functionality.
Having said that, I do think the functionality of KDE Plasma has gone downhill over the past couple years ( since Aaron started spending more time on the ill fated tablet). But as long as the appearance doesn’t hinder the use, I don’t understand anyone’s objection.