This blog post is already quite long, so it will omit changes merged for Plasma 6.5 (releasing in October, to be announced in a future post).
With the Plasma 6.2 release, we moved Plasma Dialer and Spacebar to the Plasma release cycle, allowing us to have consistent releases of the two apps. This completes our year long move to having all Plasma Mobile related projects released as part of wider KDE releases, streamlining the work for distributions and taking a load off us on having to maintain a separate release cycle!
In other news, a Fedora spin for Plasma Mobile was released! It will only be targeting devices that can currently boot Fedora (i.e. not ARM phones), but is very exciting nonetheless!
When it now could run on a pixel 9 nothing 3a or Motorola edge 60.
While I love the idea, I just don’t see this moving forward unless any of these projects can focus on splitting up these types of projects into a solid base, driver layer, and then UI layer. Instead they are all spending a ton of engineering resources building something from scratch.
So many projects have similarly started the same way and failed instead of working towards a base that replaces AOSP first, then spinning their own UI on top. The big device manufacturers figured out a decade ago this is the right way to go, and these small projects buck that and fail instead of just focusing on the thing they ultimately intend to focus on.
Get a good base that is removed from Google, THEN do this project.
solid base
GNU+Linux
driver layer
Linux
and then UI layer.
Plasma mobile
The split is already there, the problem is that most Android phone manufacturers never publish the drivers (let alone make them open-source) and the only way to get anything but stock image running is to just rip parts out of the stock image, which significantly limits what you can put below it (i.e. Linux version) and on top of it (i.e Android Java gubbins). And you can’t “just replace AOSP”, as it’s a huge complicated thing (kind of by design) which allows vendors to tightly couple the drivers to the system image. The idea of all these “mobile Linux-es” is to get rid of AOSP entirely, replacing it with “desktop Linux userspace” (systemd, musl, D-BUS, NetworkManager, pipewire, upower, mpris, libnotify, Qt/GTK, Plasma/Gnome, etc etc etc). A DE is an integral part of this; you can’t build and run Nova launcher just with Wayland and Pipewire but without Dalvik and Android SDK/NDK, and remaking all of that from scratch would be an insanely hard undertaking.
To put it another way,
Get a good base that is removed from Google, THEN do this project.
This project is required if you want to make a “good base”, otherwise that “good base” would just be an empty TTY that you can’t interact with because there’s no on-screen keyboard; besides, that “base” is already there and has been for 20 years, what’s missing is the drivers.
You have zero understanding of how this all works and is out together, so I’m going to ignore you.
What is wrong with you? Why are you like this? Did you have a bad childhood? So fucking rude. Opportunity to educate but instead you discriminate. Only thing your comment shows is that YOU know nothing.
