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I want to love Plasma Mobile. But development on it has always looked extremely dead every time I've checked on it since it has came out, and there are next to

by chc4 9y ago

I want to love Plasma Mobile. But development on it has always looked extremely dead every time I've checked on it since it has came out, and there are next to no phones that it's been ported to. I've never even seen someone mention using it online, unlike Ubuntu Touch or FirefoxOS or Sailfish (when they were all alive). Honestly, it's felt like it's been thrown by the wayside ever since it came out, and that's not encouraging to the thought of running it on a phone that you'd use as a daily driver.

zlatan_todoric 9y ago
KDE community is awesome and all they needed to revive things around plasma mobile effort is to have dedicated device and with Librem5 they would get exactly that.
emilsedgh 9y ago
Ubuntu Touch was sponsored by Canonical and Firefox OS was backed by Mozilla. Plasma is truly a community effort. So of course you haven't heard about it much. I think at any given time there are only a handful of paid developers employed by a few small and big companies working on it. That means there's not much resources and almost no paid marketing. It's also not fashionable anymore. Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS and a bunch of other projects got cancelled because the parent companies didn't expect a proper ROI. Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources. Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy. Disclaimer: Used to be a KDE contributor, in no way associated with Plasma Mobile.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources." Then there's also no company to dedicate resources, and do the unfun work that still needs to get done. "Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy." I hate to say it, but I don't see the phrase "works well" and "stable" in there. Which, while fine for a desktop, is not fine for a phone.
- carussell 9y ago
  > Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy. This is contrary to the things that KDE-associated projects have traditionally valued. Software freedom has always been associated with GNU and GTK/Gnome. The philosophy behind Qt/KDE has always been that things can be considered free enough. The KDE community's willingness to tolerate a dubious licensing situation for Qt is the only reason that Gnome even exists.
  - emilsedgh 9y ago
    That's not true. KDE originally started using Qt which was non free. Once the project took off and started to matter, 2 projects started to fix the non-free-Qt issue. One was Gnome. The other one was KDE's attempt to write a free Qt clone. But soon TrollTech approached KDE and agreed to open source Qt. There the KDE Free Qt Foundation was created. https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.... I can assure you that Software Freedom is on top of KDE's priorities. KDE has refused to even use anything non-free even in its infrastructure.
    - carussell 9y ago
      I don't see how you can point to the years where Qt used a bad license, without seeing that the only statement that it proves is not true is the one where you wrote "that's not true". (And there were plenty of people arguing at that time that the Qt license was no big deal and the free desktop community should just move on to more productive things.) I know what Qt's licensing situation is now. But it being under a free license today doesn't mean that software freedom is one of two things that the KDE community cares about above all else. If I meet a man today and he's wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't mean it's true that you can infer his personal moral code means he will only wear blue shirts. (In fact, it can still be untrue even if he personally tells you that this is his code.)
      - emilsedgh 9y ago

by chc4 9y ago

zlatan_todoric 9y ago

KDE community is awesome and all they needed to revive things around plasma mobile effort is to have dedicated device and with Librem5 they would get exactly that.

emilsedgh 9y ago

Ubuntu Touch was sponsored by Canonical and Firefox OS was backed by Mozilla. Plasma is truly a community effort. So of course you haven't heard about it much. I think at any given time there are only a handful of paid developers employed by a few small and big companies working on it. That means there's not much resources and almost no paid marketing. It's also not fashionable anymore. Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS and a bunch of other projects got cancelled because the parent companies didn't expect a proper ROI. Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources. Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy. Disclaimer: Used to be a KDE contributor, in no way associated with Plasma Mobile.

s73ver_ 9y ago
"Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources." Then there's also no company to dedicate resources, and do the unfun work that still needs to get done. "Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy." I hate to say it, but I don't see the phrase "works well" and "stable" in there. Which, while fine for a desktop, is not fine for a phone.
carussell 9y ago
> Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy. This is contrary to the things that KDE-associated projects have traditionally valued. Software freedom has always been associated with GNU and GTK/Gnome. The philosophy behind Qt/KDE has always been that things can be considered free enough. The KDE community's willingness to tolerate a dubious licensing situation for Qt is the only reason that Gnome even exists.
- emilsedgh 9y ago
  That's not true. KDE originally started using Qt which was non free. Once the project took off and started to matter, 2 projects started to fix the non-free-Qt issue. One was Gnome. The other one was KDE's attempt to write a free Qt clone. But soon TrollTech approached KDE and agreed to open source Qt. There the KDE Free Qt Foundation was created. https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.... I can assure you that Software Freedom is on top of KDE's priorities. KDE has refused to even use anything non-free even in its infrastructure.
  - carussell 9y ago
    I don't see how you can point to the years where Qt used a bad license, without seeing that the only statement that it proves is not true is the one where you wrote "that's not true". (And there were plenty of people arguing at that time that the Qt license was no big deal and the free desktop community should just move on to more productive things.) I know what Qt's licensing situation is now. But it being under a free license today doesn't mean that software freedom is one of two things that the KDE community cares about above all else. If I meet a man today and he's wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't mean it's true that you can infer his personal moral code means he will only wear blue shirts. (In fact, it can still be untrue even if he personally tells you that this is his code.)
    - emilsedgh 9y ago