11 ms·

Plasma Mobile

238 points by jbk 11y ago

jbk 11y ago
So, there is not much information on the website yet, but this is basically a full stack for mobiles, based on Wayland and Kwin for the UI and Ofono for the phone part. The reference implementation is based on Ubuntu Touch, and use libhybris to get hw support. However, it's different from UT, by the fact that it's not using Mir, but Wayland directly through Kwin. It seems to run Ubuntu Touch applications, X11 applications, KDE/QML ones and Jolla/Sailfish/Nemo ones. They seem to have Android apps on the roadmap too. Except the drivers (through libhybris), everything is open source and numerous KDE/QML apps can run without modifications. It can also run without libhybris if you have kernel DRM. The distribution is based on Kubuntu, and so far it works only on the Nexus 5.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Are there plans to expand hardware options? Is there a donate option? I can't wait to stop dealing with running Android.
  - baghira 11y ago
    I would image it should be able to run on Ubuntu phones. Also, and I'm guessing here, Tizen devices, if we ever get them.
  - jbk 11y ago
    And that, I have no idea, sorry. :D I guess that if it works with Ubuntu Touch, like Nexus 4 or the Meizu.
  - shadeslayer 11y ago
    HW Expansion : Not that I'm aware of. Donations : https://www.kde.org/ https://www.kde.org/ Thanks for the support :)
  - jtouri 11y ago
    I sure hope. This would improve affordability for anyone who wants to create startups with hardware.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  I'd be very interested in porting MOAI to this - do you know if it supports SDL, or OpenGL ES apps?
  - jbk 11y ago
    Technically, you should be able to support both.
    - fit2rule 11y ago
      Cool, I'm going to look into doing the port in the near future then ..
  - sho_hn 11y ago
    It does! The shell UI itself is a GLES app, and SDL 2.x has experimental Wayland support.
- sho_hn 11y ago
  Right, here's the stack as a quick recap: Kubuntu with systemd + Android GPU driver via libhybris + kwin as Wayland display server and compositor (with a hwcomposer backend for the renderer) + plasmashell + phone shell package. Ofono for GSM. Regular Linux desktop bits for everything else. This different from e.g. Firefox OS which relies on Android's SurfaceFlinger as display server, or Ubuntu Phone which uses their own Mir windowing system. The proprietary bits we rely on on a phone-by-phone basis (GPU drivers, radio) are abstracted away behind standard APIs (GLES) or Ofono, so all of this also runs on e.g. the desktop Mesa GL stack unmodified. The use of Kubuntu or systemd are incidental (the Kubuntu community has been a great aid!); nothing prevents any other distro from taking this - all on regular kde.org master branches slated for eventual release - and putting things together in the usual ways. We also got full open governance and no mandatory central copyright assignment at kde.org, unlike some other open-ish phone projects. As for convergence options -- plasmashell is in principle designed to be able to load and swap shell packages at runtime, while potentially retaining state. We're not quite there yet (e.g. because our Wayland bits are not up to supporting the full desktop just yet), but at some point we hope to allow you to dock your phone via HDMI, bring up Plasma Desktop on the attached monitor and e.g. retain your notifications.
  - soapdog 11y ago
    Great project, can`t wait to play with it. Just a little nitpick, as far as I know Firefox OS is not using SurfaceFlinger but talking direct to the GL layer.
    - sho_hn 11y ago
      Looks like you're entirely right: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Arch... Sorry! FWIW, there's an old ZTE Open bought retail during a KDE event in Spain on this desk somewhere and I consider Firefox OS a a Very Good Thing. :)
      - soapdog 11y ago
        Hey, there more systems available for the users the better! :D Thanks for the kind words about Firefox OS. As soon as I get a hardware compatible with Plasma Phone, I am taking it for a spin :-D
jafingi 11y ago
Pretty interesting project. And it looks great. I understand that it's work in progress, but it really need to support more devices, even in this phase. Looking forward to seeing how this will work out! A replacement for Android is much appreciated.
afro88 11y ago
Free OS on your phone is great and all, but it's got that quirky linux UI problem where usability is an after thought to "me too" features. For example, I can't read any of the text on the phone image on the front page, and physically the image on my screen is bigger than my iPhone. So the text is unreadable in the OS by default?
- tho9Ohx1eo 11y ago
  Just watch the video. Everything is similar to a current Android phone.
- jbk 11y ago
  The front page is just a marketing thingie. Look at the video. It looks great.
  - veeti 11y ago
    You must have some very low standards for "looking great". Like they say, this is a prototype and it shows. The design is all over the place. The one thing that sticks out the most is that there is no sense of scale at all. Everything is either ridiculously huge or tiny. For example, look at the compact status bar: really small text and icons. Then look at the navigation icons on the bottom of the screen, the dialer tab icons, the contact pictures: all huge. But then there's the text next to each contact picture: tiny again.
    - wz1000 11y ago
      Everything you mention is relatively easy to fix. Submit a patch if you don't like it. That's the beauty of open source :)
      - veeti 11y ago
        Ah, the good old "submit a patch if you don't like it". This is a common problem all throughout the user interface shown, not an isolated issue. And as mentioned, it's a _prototype_: I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is far, far from the final user interface anyway.
RivieraKid 11y ago
I've lost all hope in the KDE project, they simply don't understand UI / UX design.
- emilsedgh 11y ago
  Maybe contribute to it then? :) Disclaimer: I contribute to kde.
  - RivieraKid 11y ago
    I've been actually thinking about creating a new desktop environment (or a whole desktop platform ala Android if I had more time). Because there's a lot of space for improvement and innovation on (not only) Linux desktop. But this is not the case for mobile IMHO. As for contributing to KDE, it's not as fun as starting a new project, things move slowly, you have limited options of what you can do and I just generally don't agree with the mentality / philosophy / culture of the KDE project.
    - emilsedgh 11y ago
      I just generally don't agree with the mentality / philosophy / culture of the KDE project. Mind if I ask what do you dislike about it? Or what is your perception of the mentality/culture?
      - RivieraKid 11y ago
        Hard to say, it's an instinctive feeling, but let's say that it's a culture of bloat. "Should we do this or that? I don't know, let's make it an option in the settings!" Also, they seem to lack design taste.
        jbk 11y ago
        > Hard to say, it's an instinctive feeling, but let's say that it's a culture of bloat. So, in the end, you're just a troll. You have no facts, no knowledge, no reference but just your "feelings" about "bloat"; and you keep spitting on KDE's work. I'm quite sure you've not used KDE since a long time.
honest_joe 11y ago
Looks great. Would I want to use it ? Nope In order to succeed it needs to come in a polished product form. But still gl and keep hacking.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  What does "to succeed" mean? As long as it will be usable for me and some other people, not abandoned and keep progressing, it will succeed. It doesn't need to take over the market.
RivieraKid 11y ago
Yeah... new mobile platform is a really hard thing to do - and without a designer (whom they clearly don't have), it's impossible. Nobody will use this.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  Let's be honest, even if they did have a talented team of designers nobody would use this.
  - RivieraKid 11y ago
    Probably.
  - shadeslayer 11y ago
    >Let's be honest, even if they did have a talented team of designers nobody would use this. Why?
    - RivieraKid 11y ago
      Because it has very few advantages over it's competitors and tons of drawbacks.
      - zanny 11y ago
        It will run apps from every major mobile OS except iOS, and it will be completely free. It will be able to do "convergence" desktops before even Ubuntu Touch because its running an identical software stack to Kubuntu, you just need to switch the running shell. What drawbacks, again?
    - joshuapants 11y ago
      Windows Phone has a talented team of designers, an innovative and easy to use UI, and backing from a major corporation with practically unlimited funds. It also has a tiny sliver of market share. Jolla has great designers, compatibility with Android apps, and killer hardware. Their marketshare is even smaller. Realistically, right now Android and iOS have all the mindshare and there is not a chance in hell that a me-too mobile OS is going to get any meaningful traction.
arianvanp 11y ago
Awesome project. I pitty the negativity here because I always think it's good to hack around with new ideas and techologies, as it will catch many bugs and give possibilities to fix them. Speaking of Wayland, is it stable enough yet? I heard Gnome now fully supports it, which is neat. I wish XMonad would be ported to wayland though.
- madez 11y ago
  I also think it is an interesting project, even if it doesn’t find any adoption. It’s good for finding bugs in the software stack they use, and this projects existence means users have one more option. I'm curious (and a little bit excited to see) where it will bring us.
  - boudewijnrempt 11y ago
    what was really awesome was discovering how pretty much all the work we did on kwin_wayland brought wayland on desktop closer. The mobile-specific bits of code are _tiny_. The biggest problem actually was getting graphics up and running to begin with, there were weird libhybris/Qt 5.4/QtCompositor incompatibilities that had me stumped for months, _until_ we decided to go for Kwin directly.
SorelMihai 11y ago
Their website is a blatant copy of the http://spotify.com/us/ http://spotify.com/us/ website.
wz1000 11y ago
This is great. I really look forward to seeing where it goes. As an aside, KRunner is the best, most powerful and useful launcher I have ever used.
- zanny 11y ago
  If KDE could get good voice recognition like Google Now (somehow) voice activated Krunner on a phone would be insanely juicy. Doesn't Google have Voice Recognition APIs? Would it be alright to use their services in KDE?
  - socceroos 11y ago
    not having your voice stored on Google's servers is one of the reasons people are still keen on properly open phones.
wvh 11y ago
Exciting stuff. I think it's important there is a solid open-source stack on mobile, even if most people won't leave iOS or Android behind. Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development? It would be good to avoid duplicate work. Have you been thinking about the hardware problem in the long run? Jolla has apparently decided to leave the hardware business; I'm not sure where open-source mobile developers will get (guaranteed) hardware for their systems in the future.
- wz1000 11y ago
  AFAIK, this is based on Ubuntu Touch.
- sho_hn 11y ago
  > Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development? Aye. There's been some overlap on both on code and manpower between Plasma Mobile and Sailfish, and the KDE community is a major contributor to upstream Qt[0,1], including to code used by all of us. 0 = http://pusling.com/blog/?p=362 http://pusling.com/blog/?p=362 1 = https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-summit-join-forces https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-s...
davelondon 11y ago
I'm sure the remarkable similarity to the www.spotify.com/uk homepage is just a lucky coincidence: http://imgur.com/zPfdFX8 http://imgur.com/zPfdFX8
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  Huh, even the same green - #2ebd59
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    With 16.7 million colors for billions of users, and the birthday paradox, there are going to be collisions in the space of web colors.
    - PuffinBlue 11y ago
      You're right! Here we see a case of colliding layouts, colliding image primary colours in those layouts, colliding header image orientations and placement, colliding header hero placements and colliding header hero font colours. The footers and list styles seem to have had a minor fender bender too. Quite the birthday these two sites have.
- digdigdag 11y ago
  My guess is it's using a pre-built Wordpress template.
  - PuffinBlue 11y ago
    It's using a webflow[0] template but with a seemingly customised template that whoever made it called 'plasma'. [0] http://webflow.com/ http://webflow.com/
- kaitari 11y ago
  Yes, it's a blatant ripoff of Spotify's website design, not some pre-built Wordpress theme. Source: I work at Spotify.
tdkl 11y ago
Cool, another mobile OS who's finished like Android from 5 years ago.
legulere 11y ago
Too little and too late. Even if the GUI would be perfect and much better than android or iOS (which I greatly doubt, simply because of the man hours that went into those projects) there are two big things missing. An ecosystem of apps+apis and IMO even more important: sandboxing. Applications having access to basically everything just doesn't fit anymore today. It would have made much more sense to concentrate on these technologies and get sandboxing on the desktop, as all the competitors are also still struggling with that.
- shadeslayer 11y ago
  Containerized apps are coming to Linux soon, there's some effort going on over here : http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg-app http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg-app There's also Limba : https://github.com/ximion/limba https://github.com/ximion/limba
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Doesn't wayland come with a better security model than X?
- 0xFFC 11y ago
  I think they are smarter than what you think , They know this is not for everybody , and this is not going to replace android/iOS ever. They targeting people like me who are sick of android/iOS because of closeness of platform.Even canonical with its huge budget admits they don't have plan to replace iOS/android (which as you told is too late for such product , even for Microsoft which have shitload of money ) but they targeting specific user's. p.s. This is my understanding as simple end-user.I might be wrong.
  - tdkl 11y ago
    There is no money in targeting the couple %. Hell, there's almost no money in Android either unless you're Samsung.
    - 0xFFC 11y ago
      There is no money in android ? That is one of the funniest thing I ever heard in my entire life ! Just calculate how much android brought people to the internet , Then multiple it by some rate , it will be the money google make from advertising on android platform . How much internet going to grow , Google income will be grow also. Every search , Every app which you download from google play , It is direct money which goes into google's pocket, Put aside Google play income which it will get from every transaction _ 30% I think , I am not sure _ (which is huge but let assume google spend all of it on android ecosystem and maintaining). p.s. Targeting does not only imply earning money.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
Why does this even exist? This must be some of the worst UI/UX I've seen in a while.
abrowne 11y ago
Krunner is my favorite part of KDE. Glad it's part of this project.
PaulHoule 11y ago
Great, a phone that supports telepathy. Just w3hat I've always needed.
jasimq 11y ago
Name (todo) is pretty funny
jasimq 11y ago
I don't think the website is marketing the phone correctly. It should be really telling my I would want this phone over others.
deckar01 11y ago
That video intro needs some serious work. Tips: - Add narration - Keep the video under 3 minutes - Use an attractive pair of hands in the demo - Stick to high level features The most important suggestion is adding narration. I had no clue why I was being shown some of these apps.
Exuma 11y ago
This has got to be the worst phone UI i've ever seen. Can someone answer why this is special?
sharms 11y ago
For something that is in the early phases this looks amazingly functional and performant on a Nexus 5 (Android itself had a bit more latency when I had the phone). No reason for the crowd here to be so cynical, clearly they do have designers. For those holding the Apple flag, just compare the UI differences from Pixelmator and Mail.App to see there are many inconsistencies and that is fine, because different apps do different things.
Giorgi 11y ago
who is target market for this? No-one?
maheart 11y ago
So much negativity in this thread. Where's your hacker spirit? It might not yet be as feature-rich or polished as Android or iOS, but this is a very hacker-friendly project! I for one am really excited about this. I wrote about why on reddit[1]. Keep up the good work devs! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ejo62/plasma_mobile_a_free_mobile_platform/ctfmhn7 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ejo62/plasma_mobile...
- _lce0 11y ago
  Exactly. Pleople here should compare this against early Android/iOS, not with their 2015 version. We should always support open/libre projects, as they makes us all richer, even if you dont directly use (or like) them Cant wait to have a REAL linux in my pocket
  - dzhiurgis 11y ago
    I don't think people need Linux, but solid web applications support. Web will always win, yet now web apps on phones still suck. We try to wrap them into hybrid, but I think centralised distribution model is temporary solution. I think we need a way to easily switch between fullscreen tabs, navigation between tabs and solid hardware acceleration for web stack.
    - wvh 11y ago
      I'm not sure you can guarantee a great user experience on a free, open web with user privacy and choice on a device you don't have rights to because it's completely locked down beyond your control by the vendor. There should be a way to run a device that's not controlled by Google, Apple or Microsoft; not just because you're "paranoid", but because you'd like to learn and contribute, and maybe come up with some cool ideas yourself. Point in case, because it's open-source, you could work on those browser features you'd like to see on mobile systems.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    > Pleople here should compare this against early Android/iOS, not with their 2015 version. Why's that? Android and iOS are available in their 2015 versions right now.
etrautmann 11y ago
Is it supposed to be obvious what these components are? "What is a plasma phone?" "Plasma Phone OS (or simply Plasma Phone) is a complete software stack for mobile devices and includes the following libre technologies: Plasma Mobile (a Plasma-based shell), KWIN/KWayland, Voicecall, Ofono, RIL, OHM, Telepathy" Aside from Voicecall, I have no idea what these are or why they would be desirable in a phone.
- zanny 11y ago
  This isn't a pitch to average joes, its for developers, particularly those engaged in the Linux ecosystem. Plasma is the KDE desktop shell. It recently released Version 5, which is very pretty and a lot of people like it. This is a mobile version of it, which I guess is similar to what the Plasma Active / Plasma Netbook projects were - reskins of the shell for smaller screens. KWin is the KDE window manager. It recently got Wayland support, which is the next generation display protocol of the Linux desktop. Gnome also supports it now, so it will be replacing the 3 decade old Xorg server which is a security nightmare and major impediment to getting graphical GNU/Linux on more devices. Ofono is a free software telephony library, so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to support phone calls on phones. Its part of why Android distributions are so different from Linux ones - each vendor provides the full telephony stack guts, and while Android provides call APIs pretty much every system component in the phone is a binary blob shipped on the stock ROM images that developers need to copy off to ship a custom ROM. Which is why you download one Ubuntu for x86_64 but there are dozens of Cyanogenmod images for all the devices they support. Telepathy is a messaging framework used by Jolla, Gnome, and KDE. It supports a wide variety of protocols, from XMPP to SIP to libpurple (which means yahoo messenger / aim / msm support amongst others) and newer messaging providers like telegram or tox. You basically import the library and you can provide one UI to dozens of messaging / file transfer / voice or video call services. Coming up short on what RIL or OHM are abbreviations for in this context, though. Its basically a tech listing, mostly to say "this uses the stuff you already do rather than reinventing the wheel".
amelius 11y ago
I thought this was about a phone with a plasma screen :)
zanny 11y ago
So nobody is talking about Plasma Active. http://plasma-active.org/ http://plasma-active.org/ Some history, Plasma Active is about five years old now and its development coincided with a would-have-been-crowdfunded-toay tablet called Vivaldi that was supposed to be an open hardware device that never panned out because costs got out of control and interest waned. It was based on Mer, rather than Kubuntu, and Qt4 rather than 5. Today it looks like a colossal wreck, and all the "Active" app UIs developed for it are all complete wastes of code and time today because QML was not mature enough when they made that "first attempt". Today there are common themed QML elements called the qt-quick-controls that everyone can use to build UIs that adapt to every devices native toolkit, while still supporting animations and flow elements and all the nice graphical perks hardware accelerated UIs allow. Its been basically dead in the water for over two years, since the tablet project went belly up, and there even used to be a "Kubuntu-active" fork of Kubuntu that the project was maintaining as a way to try out the Plasma Active desktop on top of a Kubuntu core. The shell from Plasma Active did eventually see use in its adoption as the "netbook" interface found in Plasma 4 near the end of its lifecycle. So you definitely want some post-mortum on the last KDE mobile attempt and you also want to consider how Plasma Mobile might succeed or fail in a similar vein. Why did Plasma Active basically never do anything? Number one, no device support. It was not targeting phones at the time, and was instead looking towards tablets, but it never even ran properly on a Nexus 7 and those only turned up while it was on the decline. Without hardware, software is useless. This time around Plasma Mobile is shipping for the Nexus 5 out of the gate, a significant improvement. If they can make images for popular dev phones for a while, they will certainly have more potential devs than Active ever did, which pretty much amounted to building and running the shell in a child Kwin to tinker with, but never use on an actual device. Number two, its UI was a wreck. This was before the KDE VDG, Breeze, and Material Design were a thing, so Plasma Active was built on ugly Oxygen and Active Apps were made with effectively prototype QML1 where you had to write your own button class. As a result, all the apps not made for Active (and most weren't, since it was dead in the water) were their desktop versions and unusable on small touch screens, and all the Active apps looked like you drew some rectangles on a white background you could click because that is literally how you made buttons in QML1. Plasma Mobile does improve on this as well. Breeze, the new KDE theme, beats the pants out of their older defaults. They now have a KDE font, and a KDE icon theme meant to encompass everything, that are all consistent. they now have their visual design group making mockups and directing design for new apps and old, though there is an obvious schism between designers making mockups and anyone actually implementing them - there is an amazing Muon design that was never implemented into the final product which looks and feels like butt. And not a single core KDE app in the KDE Software releases is shipping a QML2 powered UI that is meant for mobile that uses a common design language like Material. It means all the core KDE apps - Kontact, Dolphin, whatever web browser you want to use (Rekonq is dead, Konqeror is a zombie, and there are several new projects out there - for mobile, you might be able to get away with a dumb qtwebengine wrapper), Amarok (which also has another amazing VDG UI floating around that is still unimplemented), Dragon Player, etc. They all need mobile UIs, none of them have them now, and you wouldn't even want to make a mobile UI, you would want to make adaptive UIs - you would want all these programs to be able to scale from phone size to desktop size and readjust their layouts accordingly, because that is what QML2 is really good at. Its also a complexity nightmare, if anyone has tried a responsive website, albeit QML2 does so much of a better job equipping you with the tools to do that its almost not comparable. Lastly, Plasma Active never had an app store. At all. Muon was still in its infancy back then, so you were using... Apper. Which is basically a worse Synaptic package manager, and Synaptic does not belong in the same room as a mobile phone UI. The newer appstream infrastructure and the future xdg-app tech should be great when it lands, but like I said before Muon is still a mess, though maybe that responsive adaptive UI redesign will also bring the VDG designs to the forefront finally and make it really great. But Plasma Mobile supporting Ubuntu Touch Apps, Sailfish Apps, Firefox OS HTML5 apps, and Android apps with slashtik will definitely solve the app problem. Security might become a problem, then, though. You are now mixing debs, click packages, apks, app manifests, and RPMs from Sailfish on one system. Sounds like a giant mess. So do you just containerize everything? Good luck with that limited mobile phone storage and memory size. How does apparmor integrate with that mess? How about how Muon integrates knewstuff content from kdelook and kdeapps - those are literally just zipfiles it extracts into predetermined locations. A lot of questions, but as long as they don't go over their heads and stay within their manpower - which if Active is any indication is that you really just need a core base working great before trying to take over the world - it should have much more potential than the last KDE foray into mobile. The dream, of course, is that Sailfish / Ubuntu Touch / Firefox OS all eventually rebase off Plasma Mobile and just provide their own UI shells over it, so that all the major open source mobile players are working in one ecosystem rather than working in their own trees at their own companies not trying to play ball with the competition. Good luck with that one.
kzhahou 11y ago
Are we saying "libre" now, not "free"? Just want to keep up with the latest lingo.

238 points by jbk 11y ago

jbk 11y ago

So, there is not much information on the website yet, but this is basically a full stack for mobiles, based on Wayland and Kwin for the UI and Ofono for the phone part. The reference implementation is based on Ubuntu Touch, and use libhybris to get hw support. However, it's different from UT, by the fact that it's not using Mir, but Wayland directly through Kwin. It seems to run Ubuntu Touch applications, X11 applications, KDE/QML ones and Jolla/Sailfish/Nemo ones. They seem to have Android apps on the roadmap too. Except the drivers (through libhybris), everything is open source and numerous KDE/QML apps can run without modifications. It can also run without libhybris if you have kernel DRM. The distribution is based on Kubuntu, and so far it works only on the Nexus 5.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
Are there plans to expand hardware options? Is there a donate option? I can't wait to stop dealing with running Android.
- baghira 11y ago
  I would image it should be able to run on Ubuntu phones. Also, and I'm guessing here, Tizen devices, if we ever get them.
- jbk 11y ago
  And that, I have no idea, sorry. :D I guess that if it works with Ubuntu Touch, like Nexus 4 or the Meizu.
- shadeslayer 11y ago
  HW Expansion : Not that I'm aware of. Donations : https://www.kde.org/ https://www.kde.org/ Thanks for the support :)
- jtouri 11y ago
  I sure hope. This would improve affordability for anyone who wants to create startups with hardware.
fit2rule 11y ago
I'd be very interested in porting MOAI to this - do you know if it supports SDL, or OpenGL ES apps?
- jbk 11y ago
  Technically, you should be able to support both.
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Cool, I'm going to look into doing the port in the near future then ..
- sho_hn 11y ago
  It does! The shell UI itself is a GLES app, and SDL 2.x has experimental Wayland support.
sho_hn 11y ago
Right, here's the stack as a quick recap: Kubuntu with systemd + Android GPU driver via libhybris + kwin as Wayland display server and compositor (with a hwcomposer backend for the renderer) + plasmashell + phone shell package. Ofono for GSM. Regular Linux desktop bits for everything else. This different from e.g. Firefox OS which relies on Android's SurfaceFlinger as display server, or Ubuntu Phone which uses their own Mir windowing system. The proprietary bits we rely on on a phone-by-phone basis (GPU drivers, radio) are abstracted away behind standard APIs (GLES) or Ofono, so all of this also runs on e.g. the desktop Mesa GL stack unmodified. The use of Kubuntu or systemd are incidental (the Kubuntu community has been a great aid!); nothing prevents any other distro from taking this - all on regular kde.org master branches slated for eventual release - and putting things together in the usual ways. We also got full open governance and no mandatory central copyright assignment at kde.org, unlike some other open-ish phone projects. As for convergence options -- plasmashell is in principle designed to be able to load and swap shell packages at runtime, while potentially retaining state. We're not quite there yet (e.g. because our Wayland bits are not up to supporting the full desktop just yet), but at some point we hope to allow you to dock your phone via HDMI, bring up Plasma Desktop on the attached monitor and e.g. retain your notifications.
- soapdog 11y ago
  Great project, can`t wait to play with it. Just a little nitpick, as far as I know Firefox OS is not using SurfaceFlinger but talking direct to the GL layer.
  - sho_hn 11y ago
    Looks like you're entirely right: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Arch... Sorry! FWIW, there's an old ZTE Open bought retail during a KDE event in Spain on this desk somewhere and I consider Firefox OS a a Very Good Thing. :)
    - soapdog 11y ago
      Hey, there more systems available for the users the better! :D Thanks for the kind words about Firefox OS. As soon as I get a hardware compatible with Plasma Phone, I am taking it for a spin :-D

jafingi 11y ago

Pretty interesting project. And it looks great. I understand that it's work in progress, but it really need to support more devices, even in this phase. Looking forward to seeing how this will work out! A replacement for Android is much appreciated.

afro88 11y ago

Free OS on your phone is great and all, but it's got that quirky linux UI problem where usability is an after thought to "me too" features. For example, I can't read any of the text on the phone image on the front page, and physically the image on my screen is bigger than my iPhone. So the text is unreadable in the OS by default?

tho9Ohx1eo 11y ago
Just watch the video. Everything is similar to a current Android phone.
jbk 11y ago
The front page is just a marketing thingie. Look at the video. It looks great.
- veeti 11y ago
  You must have some very low standards for "looking great". Like they say, this is a prototype and it shows. The design is all over the place. The one thing that sticks out the most is that there is no sense of scale at all. Everything is either ridiculously huge or tiny. For example, look at the compact status bar: really small text and icons. Then look at the navigation icons on the bottom of the screen, the dialer tab icons, the contact pictures: all huge. But then there's the text next to each contact picture: tiny again.
  - wz1000 11y ago
    Everything you mention is relatively easy to fix. Submit a patch if you don't like it. That's the beauty of open source :)
    - veeti 11y ago
      Ah, the good old "submit a patch if you don't like it". This is a common problem all throughout the user interface shown, not an isolated issue. And as mentioned, it's a _prototype_: I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is far, far from the final user interface anyway.

RivieraKid 11y ago

I've lost all hope in the KDE project, they simply don't understand UI / UX design.

emilsedgh 11y ago
Maybe contribute to it then? :) Disclaimer: I contribute to kde.
- RivieraKid 11y ago
  I've been actually thinking about creating a new desktop environment (or a whole desktop platform ala Android if I had more time). Because there's a lot of space for improvement and innovation on (not only) Linux desktop. But this is not the case for mobile IMHO. As for contributing to KDE, it's not as fun as starting a new project, things move slowly, you have limited options of what you can do and I just generally don't agree with the mentality / philosophy / culture of the KDE project.
  - emilsedgh 11y ago
    I just generally don't agree with the mentality / philosophy / culture of the KDE project. Mind if I ask what do you dislike about it? Or what is your perception of the mentality/culture?
    - RivieraKid 11y ago
      Hard to say, it's an instinctive feeling, but let's say that it's a culture of bloat. "Should we do this or that? I don't know, let's make it an option in the settings!" Also, they seem to lack design taste.
      - jbk 11y ago
        > Hard to say, it's an instinctive feeling, but let's say that it's a culture of bloat. So, in the end, you're just a troll. You have no facts, no knowledge, no reference but just your "feelings" about "bloat"; and you keep spitting on KDE's work. I'm quite sure you've not used KDE since a long time.

honest_joe 11y ago

Looks great. Would I want to use it ? Nope In order to succeed it needs to come in a polished product form. But still gl and keep hacking.

seba_dos1 11y ago
What does "to succeed" mean? As long as it will be usable for me and some other people, not abandoned and keep progressing, it will succeed. It doesn't need to take over the market.

RivieraKid 11y ago

Yeah... new mobile platform is a really hard thing to do - and without a designer (whom they clearly don't have), it's impossible. Nobody will use this.

joshuapants 11y ago
Let's be honest, even if they did have a talented team of designers nobody would use this.
- RivieraKid 11y ago
  Probably.
- shadeslayer 11y ago
  >Let's be honest, even if they did have a talented team of designers nobody would use this. Why?
  - RivieraKid 11y ago
    Because it has very few advantages over it's competitors and tons of drawbacks.
    - zanny 11y ago
      It will run apps from every major mobile OS except iOS, and it will be completely free. It will be able to do "convergence" desktops before even Ubuntu Touch because its running an identical software stack to Kubuntu, you just need to switch the running shell. What drawbacks, again?
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    Windows Phone has a talented team of designers, an innovative and easy to use UI, and backing from a major corporation with practically unlimited funds. It also has a tiny sliver of market share. Jolla has great designers, compatibility with Android apps, and killer hardware. Their marketshare is even smaller. Realistically, right now Android and iOS have all the mindshare and there is not a chance in hell that a me-too mobile OS is going to get any meaningful traction.

arianvanp 11y ago

Awesome project. I pitty the negativity here because I always think it's good to hack around with new ideas and techologies, as it will catch many bugs and give possibilities to fix them. Speaking of Wayland, is it stable enough yet? I heard Gnome now fully supports it, which is neat. I wish XMonad would be ported to wayland though.

madez 11y ago
I also think it is an interesting project, even if it doesn’t find any adoption. It’s good for finding bugs in the software stack they use, and this projects existence means users have one more option. I'm curious (and a little bit excited to see) where it will bring us.
- boudewijnrempt 11y ago
  what was really awesome was discovering how pretty much all the work we did on kwin_wayland brought wayland on desktop closer. The mobile-specific bits of code are _tiny_. The biggest problem actually was getting graphics up and running to begin with, there were weird libhybris/Qt 5.4/QtCompositor incompatibilities that had me stumped for months, _until_ we decided to go for Kwin directly.

SorelMihai 11y ago

Their website is a blatant copy of the http://spotify.com/us/ http://spotify.com/us/ website.

wz1000 11y ago

This is great. I really look forward to seeing where it goes. As an aside, KRunner is the best, most powerful and useful launcher I have ever used.

zanny 11y ago
If KDE could get good voice recognition like Google Now (somehow) voice activated Krunner on a phone would be insanely juicy. Doesn't Google have Voice Recognition APIs? Would it be alright to use their services in KDE?
- socceroos 11y ago
  not having your voice stored on Google's servers is one of the reasons people are still keen on properly open phones.

wvh 11y ago

Exciting stuff. I think it's important there is a solid open-source stack on mobile, even if most people won't leave iOS or Android behind. Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development? It would be good to avoid duplicate work. Have you been thinking about the hardware problem in the long run? Jolla has apparently decided to leave the hardware business; I'm not sure where open-source mobile developers will get (guaranteed) hardware for their systems in the future.

wz1000 11y ago
AFAIK, this is based on Ubuntu Touch.
sho_hn 11y ago
> Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development? Aye. There's been some overlap on both on code and manpower between Plasma Mobile and Sailfish, and the KDE community is a major contributor to upstream Qt[0,1], including to code used by all of us. 0 = http://pusling.com/blog/?p=362 http://pusling.com/blog/?p=362 1 = https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-summit-join-forces https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-s...

davelondon 11y ago

I'm sure the remarkable similarity to the www.spotify.com/uk homepage is just a lucky coincidence: http://imgur.com/zPfdFX8 http://imgur.com/zPfdFX8

PuffinBlue 11y ago
Huh, even the same green - #2ebd59
- nitrogen 11y ago
  With 16.7 million colors for billions of users, and the birthday paradox, there are going to be collisions in the space of web colors.
  - PuffinBlue 11y ago
    You're right! Here we see a case of colliding layouts, colliding image primary colours in those layouts, colliding header image orientations and placement, colliding header hero placements and colliding header hero font colours. The footers and list styles seem to have had a minor fender bender too. Quite the birthday these two sites have.
digdigdag 11y ago
My guess is it's using a pre-built Wordpress template.
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  It's using a webflow[0] template but with a seemingly customised template that whoever made it called 'plasma'. [0] http://webflow.com/ http://webflow.com/
kaitari 11y ago
Yes, it's a blatant ripoff of Spotify's website design, not some pre-built Wordpress theme. Source: I work at Spotify.

tdkl 11y ago

Cool, another mobile OS who's finished like Android from 5 years ago.

legulere 11y ago

Too little and too late. Even if the GUI would be perfect and much better than android or iOS (which I greatly doubt, simply because of the man hours that went into those projects) there are two big things missing. An ecosystem of apps+apis and IMO even more important: sandboxing. Applications having access to basically everything just doesn't fit anymore today. It would have made much more sense to concentrate on these technologies and get sandboxing on the desktop, as all the competitors are also still struggling with that.

shadeslayer 11y ago
Containerized apps are coming to Linux soon, there's some effort going on over here : http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg-app http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg-app There's also Limba : https://github.com/ximion/limba https://github.com/ximion/limba
JupiterMoon 11y ago
Doesn't wayland come with a better security model than X?
0xFFC 11y ago
I think they are smarter than what you think , They know this is not for everybody , and this is not going to replace android/iOS ever. They targeting people like me who are sick of android/iOS because of closeness of platform.Even canonical with its huge budget admits they don't have plan to replace iOS/android (which as you told is too late for such product , even for Microsoft which have shitload of money ) but they targeting specific user's. p.s. This is my understanding as simple end-user.I might be wrong.
- tdkl 11y ago
  There is no money in targeting the couple %. Hell, there's almost no money in Android either unless you're Samsung.
  - 0xFFC 11y ago
    There is no money in android ? That is one of the funniest thing I ever heard in my entire life ! Just calculate how much android brought people to the internet , Then multiple it by some rate , it will be the money google make from advertising on android platform . How much internet going to grow , Google income will be grow also. Every search , Every app which you download from google play , It is direct money which goes into google's pocket, Put aside Google play income which it will get from every transaction _ 30% I think , I am not sure _ (which is huge but let assume google spend all of it on android ecosystem and maintaining). p.s. Targeting does not only imply earning money.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

Why does this even exist? This must be some of the worst UI/UX I've seen in a while.

abrowne 11y ago

Krunner is my favorite part of KDE. Glad it's part of this project.

PaulHoule 11y ago

Great, a phone that supports telepathy. Just w3hat I've always needed.

jasimq 11y ago

Name (todo) is pretty funny

jasimq 11y ago

I don't think the website is marketing the phone correctly. It should be really telling my I would want this phone over others.

deckar01 11y ago

That video intro needs some serious work. Tips: - Add narration - Keep the video under 3 minutes - Use an attractive pair of hands in the demo - Stick to high level features The most important suggestion is adding narration. I had no clue why I was being shown some of these apps.

Exuma 11y ago

This has got to be the worst phone UI i've ever seen. Can someone answer why this is special?

sharms 11y ago

For something that is in the early phases this looks amazingly functional and performant on a Nexus 5 (Android itself had a bit more latency when I had the phone). No reason for the crowd here to be so cynical, clearly they do have designers. For those holding the Apple flag, just compare the UI differences from Pixelmator and Mail.App to see there are many inconsistencies and that is fine, because different apps do different things.

Giorgi 11y ago

who is target market for this? No-one?

maheart 11y ago

So much negativity in this thread. Where's your hacker spirit? It might not yet be as feature-rich or polished as Android or iOS, but this is a very hacker-friendly project! I for one am really excited about this. I wrote about why on reddit[1]. Keep up the good work devs! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ejo62/plasma_mobile_a_free_mobile_platform/ctfmhn7 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ejo62/plasma_mobile...

_lce0 11y ago
Exactly. Pleople here should compare this against early Android/iOS, not with their 2015 version. We should always support open/libre projects, as they makes us all richer, even if you dont directly use (or like) them Cant wait to have a REAL linux in my pocket
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  I don't think people need Linux, but solid web applications support. Web will always win, yet now web apps on phones still suck. We try to wrap them into hybrid, but I think centralised distribution model is temporary solution. I think we need a way to easily switch between fullscreen tabs, navigation between tabs and solid hardware acceleration for web stack.
  - wvh 11y ago
    I'm not sure you can guarantee a great user experience on a free, open web with user privacy and choice on a device you don't have rights to because it's completely locked down beyond your control by the vendor. There should be a way to run a device that's not controlled by Google, Apple or Microsoft; not just because you're "paranoid", but because you'd like to learn and contribute, and maybe come up with some cool ideas yourself. Point in case, because it's open-source, you could work on those browser features you'd like to see on mobile systems.
- cwyers 11y ago
  > Pleople here should compare this against early Android/iOS, not with their 2015 version. Why's that? Android and iOS are available in their 2015 versions right now.

etrautmann 11y ago

Is it supposed to be obvious what these components are? "What is a plasma phone?" "Plasma Phone OS (or simply Plasma Phone) is a complete software stack for mobile devices and includes the following libre technologies: Plasma Mobile (a Plasma-based shell), KWIN/KWayland, Voicecall, Ofono, RIL, OHM, Telepathy" Aside from Voicecall, I have no idea what these are or why they would be desirable in a phone.

zanny 11y ago
This isn't a pitch to average joes, its for developers, particularly those engaged in the Linux ecosystem. Plasma is the KDE desktop shell. It recently released Version 5, which is very pretty and a lot of people like it. This is a mobile version of it, which I guess is similar to what the Plasma Active / Plasma Netbook projects were - reskins of the shell for smaller screens. KWin is the KDE window manager. It recently got Wayland support, which is the next generation display protocol of the Linux desktop. Gnome also supports it now, so it will be replacing the 3 decade old Xorg server which is a security nightmare and major impediment to getting graphical GNU/Linux on more devices. Ofono is a free software telephony library, so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to support phone calls on phones. Its part of why Android distributions are so different from Linux ones - each vendor provides the full telephony stack guts, and while Android provides call APIs pretty much every system component in the phone is a binary blob shipped on the stock ROM images that developers need to copy off to ship a custom ROM. Which is why you download one Ubuntu for x86_64 but there are dozens of Cyanogenmod images for all the devices they support. Telepathy is a messaging framework used by Jolla, Gnome, and KDE. It supports a wide variety of protocols, from XMPP to SIP to libpurple (which means yahoo messenger / aim / msm support amongst others) and newer messaging providers like telegram or tox. You basically import the library and you can provide one UI to dozens of messaging / file transfer / voice or video call services. Coming up short on what RIL or OHM are abbreviations for in this context, though. Its basically a tech listing, mostly to say "this uses the stuff you already do rather than reinventing the wheel".

amelius 11y ago

I thought this was about a phone with a plasma screen :)

zanny 11y ago

So nobody is talking about Plasma Active. http://plasma-active.org/ http://plasma-active.org/ Some history, Plasma Active is about five years old now and its development coincided with a would-have-been-crowdfunded-toay tablet called Vivaldi that was supposed to be an open hardware device that never panned out because costs got out of control and interest waned. It was based on Mer, rather than Kubuntu, and Qt4 rather than 5. Today it looks like a colossal wreck, and all the "Active" app UIs developed for it are all complete wastes of code and time today because QML was not mature enough when they made that "first attempt". Today there are common themed QML elements called the qt-quick-controls that everyone can use to build UIs that adapt to every devices native toolkit, while still supporting animations and flow elements and all the nice graphical perks hardware accelerated UIs allow. Its been basically dead in the water for over two years, since the tablet project went belly up, and there even used to be a "Kubuntu-active" fork of Kubuntu that the project was maintaining as a way to try out the Plasma Active desktop on top of a Kubuntu core. The shell from Plasma Active did eventually see use in its adoption as the "netbook" interface found in Plasma 4 near the end of its lifecycle. So you definitely want some post-mortum on the last KDE mobile attempt and you also want to consider how Plasma Mobile might succeed or fail in a similar vein. Why did Plasma Active basically never do anything? Number one, no device support. It was not targeting phones at the time, and was instead looking towards tablets, but it never even ran properly on a Nexus 7 and those only turned up while it was on the decline. Without hardware, software is useless. This time around Plasma Mobile is shipping for the Nexus 5 out of the gate, a significant improvement. If they can make images for popular dev phones for a while, they will certainly have more potential devs than Active ever did, which pretty much amounted to building and running the shell in a child Kwin to tinker with, but never use on an actual device. Number two, its UI was a wreck. This was before the KDE VDG, Breeze, and Material Design were a thing, so Plasma Active was built on ugly Oxygen and Active Apps were made with effectively prototype QML1 where you had to write your own button class. As a result, all the apps not made for Active (and most weren't, since it was dead in the water) were their desktop versions and unusable on small touch screens, and all the Active apps looked like you drew some rectangles on a white background you could click because that is literally how you made buttons in QML1. Plasma Mobile does improve on this as well. Breeze, the new KDE theme, beats the pants out of their older defaults. They now have a KDE font, and a KDE icon theme meant to encompass everything, that are all consistent. they now have their visual design group making mockups and directing design for new apps and old, though there is an obvious schism between designers making mockups and anyone actually implementing them - there is an amazing Muon design that was never implemented into the final product which looks and feels like butt. And not a single core KDE app in the KDE Software releases is shipping a QML2 powered UI that is meant for mobile that uses a common design language like Material. It means all the core KDE apps - Kontact, Dolphin, whatever web browser you want to use (Rekonq is dead, Konqeror is a zombie, and there are several new projects out there - for mobile, you might be able to get away with a dumb qtwebengine wrapper), Amarok (which also has another amazing VDG UI floating around that is still unimplemented), Dragon Player, etc. They all need mobile UIs, none of them have them now, and you wouldn't even want to make a mobile UI, you would want to make adaptive UIs - you would want all these programs to be able to scale from phone size to desktop size and readjust their layouts accordingly, because that is what QML2 is really good at. Its also a complexity nightmare, if anyone has tried a responsive website, albeit QML2 does so much of a better job equipping you with the tools to do that its almost not comparable. Lastly, Plasma Active never had an app store. At all. Muon was still in its infancy back then, so you were using... Apper. Which is basically a worse Synaptic package manager, and Synaptic does not belong in the same room as a mobile phone UI. The newer appstream infrastructure and the future xdg-app tech should be great when it lands, but like I said before Muon is still a mess, though maybe that responsive adaptive UI redesign will also bring the VDG designs to the forefront finally and make it really great. But Plasma Mobile supporting Ubuntu Touch Apps, Sailfish Apps, Firefox OS HTML5 apps, and Android apps with slashtik will definitely solve the app problem. Security might become a problem, then, though. You are now mixing debs, click packages, apks, app manifests, and RPMs from Sailfish on one system. Sounds like a giant mess. So do you just containerize everything? Good luck with that limited mobile phone storage and memory size. How does apparmor integrate with that mess? How about how Muon integrates knewstuff content from kdelook and kdeapps - those are literally just zipfiles it extracts into predetermined locations. A lot of questions, but as long as they don't go over their heads and stay within their manpower - which if Active is any indication is that you really just need a core base working great before trying to take over the world - it should have much more potential than the last KDE foray into mobile. The dream, of course, is that Sailfish / Ubuntu Touch / Firefox OS all eventually rebase off Plasma Mobile and just provide their own UI shells over it, so that all the major open source mobile players are working in one ecosystem rather than working in their own trees at their own companies not trying to play ball with the competition. Good luck with that one.

kzhahou 11y ago

Are we saying "libre" now, not "free"? Just want to keep up with the latest lingo.