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KDE Community Announces Fully Open Source Plasma Mobile
sfcrazy writes: Today, during the Akademy event, the KDE Community announced Plasma Mobile project. It's a Free (as in Freedom and beer), user-friendly, privacy-enabling and customizable platform for mobile devices. Plasma Mobile claims to be developed in an open process, and considering the community behind it, I don't doubt it.
A great line: "Plasma Mobile is designed as an ‘inclusive’ platform and will support all kinds of apps. In addition to native apps written in Qt, it also supports GTK apps, Android apps, Ubuntu apps, and many others." And if you have a Nexus 5, you can download and play with a prototype now.
It's a platform, obviously.
I haven't used Plasma Mobile, but the current mobile ecosystem is a mess, so we badly need an alternative even if it is niche.
Right now we have these choices:
iOS - Huge app ecosystem, but a non-starter for anyone who doesn't consider it acceptable for Apple maintain control over everybody's device, able to censor what apps you can run, etc. It is not an open platform, it's a control-freak company deciding what you can and can't do.
Android - Huge app ecosystem, but a non-starter for anyone who doesn't consider it acceptable for mass scale harvesting of personal data by an advertising company. It's a "half open" platform, but the app ecosystem is a clusterfuck of crapware.
FirefoxOS - "web apps". Meh.
I don't know if Plasma is the answer, but today we don't have an answer for people who want a good mobile platform that is beholden to the device's actual owner. If this thing can be on the side of its owners, and enough apps are developed and ported to be useful (it doesn't have to get anywhere near the iOS or Android level - even a few % of that is fine as long as it covers the major bases), maybe it is an interesting project.
My cows are from France.
They go "Moi".
They are very self centered...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Wayland.
why not read the article and view the video to find out?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Do we get an open radio? is that outside the scope of this project?
I'd really love to be able to call someone a mile away when we are both near each other but not a mast!
I haven't read TFA, but as this is for mobile devices, most likely it's a framebuffer.
This isn't the same KDE that runs on your desktop, this is a different version made for mobile platforms. Some of the underlying code (the "framework") is the same, but the UI is different. KDE is the only group out there, it seems, that thinks we should have different interfaces on different devices.
Since it seems that mobile is where the growth is. Therefore, if you're not there you'll miss on the millions of users who will use mobile devices as their primary (or only) computing devices. Of course, for commercial software (Windows) that's the difference from making a lot of money or just get much less from only the desktop market. For open source what you risk is irrelevance.
At least I hope, this adapting of Plasma to mobile didn't involve fucking up the UI for desktop use as it happened with Windows 8/10.
KDE is the only group out there, it seems, that thinks we should have different interfaces on different devices.
KDE is also the only group out there that thinks we should have different interfaces on the same device.
lucm, indeed.
Your script failed the Turing test.
lucm, indeed.
Note to the KDE developers: KDE is not supposed to be the star of the show. It's supposed to be there, unnoticed in the background, ready to do what I tell it to do, not what it thinks that I should be doing.
And they're right. I'm looking forward to setting up Plasma Mobile to automatically replace Plasma Desktop when I switch my Yoga 2 Pro into tablet mode.
I am free. Phones are "free"; Software is "free"; When will we loose the quotation marks?
You did not turn it into a haiku.
My cows are from France.
They are very self-centered.
They go Moi Moi Moi.
I admit it is not as good as the gay sex haiku that has been popping up lately. But your post was so very close that it had to be done.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Sexconker is, I think, a goober at times. However, they posted one comment that was a parody of the moo troll. I am not sure how we concluded that they are the actual moo troll based on such limited data. I think they are more likely to be the GNAA guy. Maybe the goatse guy? Speaking of which, that goatse guy has been here for a very long time. That is some serious dedication.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You have been here long enough to know that such behavior is not tolerated around here. You should feel bad for even suggesting such a thing. RTFA? No... We do not even read the summary half the time. We do not even read the comment we are replying to half the time. It is how we roll.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
As a KDE person, I find the demo clip rather disappointing. So I have nothing against KDE, to the contrary.
But what we see is totally off the shelf, a phone applet being pretty blunt, other apps, very much skeleton apps. I believe it does what it should do, but there was no visible refinement to a staple diet, basic interface.
It looks as if the underlying software was the standard KDE software, so that would be fine, if we had an ecosystem that works on 32" as well as on 4.5". Does it? Thanks to Qt it ought to.
So we see something of a rather academic interest?
Someone postulated that it was a group of trolls who made posts to see who could get the highest response count. They seemed to indicate some higher knowledge but, frankly, they could just be conspiratorially inclined. Anyhow, the posts seem to show up fairly quick and at all hours of the day. I suspect it is a bot. Faking a CAPTCHA is not too hard to do once you have enough samples.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
i know but i feel the need to occasionally encourage the lazy ones, i may get a convert one day but i'm not holding my breath.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)