
Plasma Mobile - jbk
http://plasma-mobile.org/
======
jbk
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
Are there plans to expand hardware options? Is there a donate option? I can't
wait to stop dealing with running Android.

~~~
shadeslayer
HW Expansion : Not that I'm aware of.

Donations : [https://www.kde.org/](https://www.kde.org/)

Thanks for the support :)

------
maheart
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ejo62/plasma_mobile_a_free_mobile_platform/ctfmhn7)

~~~
eridal
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

~~~
phogg
There's no need to wait: the n900 was real Linux (with X, apt-get and anything
you could want) as was the n9. If Nokia hadn't scrapped the n9 virtually as
soon as it was finished it would be a serious competitor right now.

The experience, speaking as an n9 user who eventually moved to Android, was
much more pleasant on the n9. The only problem was limited app selection.

~~~
chei0aiV
There is a real successor to the N900 called Neo900:

[http://neo900.org/](http://neo900.org/)

Still in development but some really cool stuff like isolation of the modem.

------
wvh
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.

~~~
sho_hn
> 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-s...](https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-
summit-join-forces)

------
arianvanp
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
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
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.

------
sharms
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.

------
afro88
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?

~~~
sho_hn
FWIW, this is very early and not representative of where we want the UI to be.
A lot of our effort so far has gone into e.g. getting our Wayland story sorted
out (we knew we wanted to be Wayland from day 1 on the phone, and do it
properly to where every line of code we write also gets Plasma Desktop closer
to being on Wayland) and getting all our service infrastructure ducks in a row
on a phone device. Our community designers have in the meantime poured a lot
of effort into generating user personas, design guidelines and mockups, but
we're only just beginning to reallocate developer resources to realization.

This is open source -- you get to see how the sausage is made.

~~~
Qwertious
I'd actually disagree - this is a problem that KDE has in general. KDE has a
focus on features and customisation but chronically lacks in the UI/UX
department, whereas GNOME has a focus on UI/UX but is obsessed with one-size-
fits-all and is actually going _backwards_ with options, and ends up somewhat
braindead as a result if you don't like exactly what the GNOME team likes.

Seriously, KDE isn't new. Desktop has really shitty defaults, which is a major
problem considering how many people don't know how to change the settings. I'm
talking about "not a computer person" people, here.

~~~
sho_hn
> I'd actually disagree - this is a problem that KDE has in general.

Are you actually _disagreeing_ , though? We both seem to agree it needs work.
And you're correct the challenge is partly an institutional one -- recruiting
and retaining design talent and manpower, and fashioning new ways of working
together. It's something we're aware of and working on, and if you'd like to
work on it with us we'll welcome you with open arms.

The KDE community isn't unaware of its weak spots and isn't satsified with its
weak spots; addressing weak spots is Real Work[tm] though, and doesn't always
happen over night. We'd like to think we've made some progress (for example
we've identified some things that _don 't_ work from past attempts, and that's
useful institutional knowledge as well), though. And that it's very much worth
doing.

tl;dr If open source is bad at product design, we'd rather not accept that as
law of nature and work out how to get better. If that's a challenge you have
an appetite for ...

------
jafingi
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.

------
etrautmann
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
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".

------
deckar01
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.

------
wz1000
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
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
not having your voice stored on Google's servers is one of the reasons people
are still keen on properly open phones.

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

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

~~~
chestnut-tree
I think the main problem is that the open source model of software development
doesn't really work when it comes to visual or interaction design. We've all
heard that phrase 'design by commitee' but that's what you get when everyone
wants a say in the way the UI works.

I can understand why this happens even though the outcome is often an
unfriendly UI. Imagine you're a developer who's spent time and effort
contributing to an open source project. Naturally you'll have an opinion on
the UX and what suits your preferences. Everyone else using or contributing
will also have a strong opinion. The moment you try and delgate visual and
interaction design to a small, dedicated team is the moment the whole project
generates enormous resentment from the "community".

Plus, any attempt to (sincerely) improve or simplify an interface will always
be met at some point with the charge of "dumbing down".

Open source and design have never had a good relationship. I wish it were
otherwise, but I don't know how it could be made better.

~~~
wz1000
What do you find 'unfriendly' about Plasma 5 and Breeze?

~~~
chestnut-tree
I was talking in general about Open Source and design not about Plasma. But
since you ask, here are some small things I noticed in the video

\- Mismatched visual styles: when you tap the phone icon, you get a bar of
three icons. Two are simple line icons (History and Contacts), the third is a
detailed picture of a keyboard to denote keypad. A minor thing and easily
fixed.

\- Interface inconsistencies: I noticed that a large red X is used for closing
a screen (which I like over the sometimes unclear Back button behaviour you
get in Android). But at 3:16 in the video the Wallpaper screen has a 'close'
button (with X) and below that in the tab bar is the larger red X for closing
too. So you have two close functions on the same screen. You see the same
duplication on the date and Time screen at 3:41. By the way, I think the way
Windows Phone lets you change date and time is much nicer. It's a similar
spinner approach to Plasma but less cluttered. Here's a video of it in action:
[https://youtu.be/kIsWgCX7qtE?t=54s](https://youtu.be/kIsWgCX7qtE?t=54s)

Also, the commands 'close', 'cancel' and 'delete' all tend to use the same X
icon in many UIs so if there is no label for X, then it's meaning (and
behaviour) should be consistent across the OS.

\- Weather app: there is a 'hamburger' menu on the left and another slimmer
hamburger menu on the right. They feel too similar visually. Presumably, the
right-hand menu is equivalent to the overflow menu you find on Android. But
are two menus needed here? Could they not all sit in one menu?

Obviously, this is a beta and these are relatively minor points. I can see
some influence from Android, which is fine - there's no doubt that Google,
Microsoft and Apple all study and are influenced by each others work. I just
hope the OS stands up well as a unique UI rather than just a clone of bits
from other OSes.

Overall, it looks quite polished for a version 1.0 and I hope the project
succeeds. I would love to see an open source project take the lead in
design/UX over existing projects.

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

------
zanny
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.

~~~
chei0aiV
The big problem is device support and how vendors approach that. They just
throw crappy Linux BSPs over the wall for GPL compliance. For any community
project to approach Android levels of device support is impossible because it
takes a multi-million dollar effort to rewrite all that stuff and merge it
into Linux mainline.

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

------
jasimq
Name (todo) is pretty funny

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

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

------
davelondon
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)

~~~
digdigdag
My guess is it's using a pre-built Wordpress template.

~~~
PuffinBlue
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/)

------
honest_joe
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
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
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.

~~~
jbk
Why are you so negative? Why do you say they don't have a designer? Did you
ask? This is a technology preview, and for a new development platform, it's
quite nice already.

~~~
Qwertious
As a technology preview, it sucks. Not many technical details at all.

So it's a full stack, and you can run apps from a variety of (Qt-based)
sources on it. It also has a few phrases like

ENJOY NEW USER EXPERIENCE

ADAPTABLE USER INTERFACE

Focus on mobile devices.

 __FREE OS __FOR YOUR PHONE

Uhh, okay? Oh, and the video shows that the phone is basically an Android
clone. Great.

I can't talk about the other person, but if I'm being negative it's because
this has a really hype-ey 6-minute trailer advertising nothing of interest.
Rule of thumb: Your trailer should never be more than two minutes, because
otherwise it's probably _really damn slow_ , and frankly a minute is pushing
it.

~~~
wvh
This is not a marketing video. It mostly shows how Qt apps work with little or
no modification, and that it is possible to use existing software with minimal
adaptation. I think it is interesting because if a few people can make a
usable prototype with some effort, there is hope that some more people and
effort can actually produce a reasonably nice open-source mobile system to
build on; that a phone running on open-source software is not an impossible or
far-fetched idea.

------
Giorgi
who is target market for this? No-one?

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

------
miguelrochefort
Why does this even exist?

This must be some of the worst UI/UX I've seen in a while.

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

------
legulere
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.

~~~
0xFFC
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
There is no money in targeting the couple %. Hell, there's almost no money in
Android either unless you're Samsung.

~~~
0xFFC
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.

~~~
tdkl
[http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/apple-eating-all-the-
profit...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/apple-eating-all-the-profits/)

~~~
0xFFC
You clearly misunderstood the article.As I mentioned eariler Yes , there is no
profit in selling Android products _hardware:some , software:none_( which
indeed article talks about that) , but that is not Google's strategy at
all.Please search and read about Google's making money strategy.

Remember Android is "strategy" for Google, "point" is to bring more and more
people to cloud/internet.thats why Android as software developed and available
from Google for free.

