Plasma Mobile, the convergent KDE smartphone OS, is on show at Akademy 2017.
The annual KDE summit is taking place this week in Spain. Various KDE luminaries are in attendance, including KDE Neon lead Jonathan Riddell.
At the KDE Neon stand, Riddell took provides the KDE community YouTube channel with an update on the progress of Plasma Mobile, the open-source mobile OS.
While Riddell doesn’t quite give us a whizz-round tour of the OS and the UI (I’d love to know how the Firefox app glimpsed in the app launcher looks on a phone, for example) he does offer some update on its current status.
‘While it’s no where near consumer reader, it is hacker ready’
“[Plasma Mobile] feels like quite a slow moving project at times because, unlike developing on the desktop, where there’s your typical standard IBM Intel PC stuff, here of course every single device has its own differences and challenges,” he says.
“We’re using the Google Nexus 5X which is a pretty open and readily available device. And it’s also working with project Halium, which means that now Plasma Mobile is working with the Ubuntu community team and a couple of other mobile teams, working on a common platform. The whole platform and device support should be the same across those different projects.”
“This is our Plasma software which shares 90% of the codebase with the desktop but of course has a different form factor. And thanks to Qt and Kirigami and similar technologies its pretty easy to make a user-interface that works with both multiple different devices and form factors.”
But if you were hoping to hear it’s almost ready for use, you’ll be disappointed. Riddell comments that “while it’s no where near consumer reader it is hacker ready for people who want their traditional Linux system in a mobile environment so that applications can work across them both.”