I'm one of the Plasma Mobile developer and I would be happy to answer questions.
Any link to this? How do I make a simple hello world in Plasma Mobile :)
* Plasma Mobile dev documentation: https://docs.plasma-mobile.org/
* General Kirigami documentation: https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/
* API documention of Kirigami: https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/html/
The documentation could be better, so if you have any trouble don't hesitate to ask questions in our Matrix channel: https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#plasmamobile:kde.org
Is the hardware of Pinephone considered stable?
How is the development on such platform, the same a on Desktop GNU/Linux? Do we have a permission system similar to Android? Can we launch easily background application and awake the phone when needed (for notifications)? Is there a documentation on the packaging system?
How long can the battery last at the moment (with mostly idle phone)?
Thanks!
There has been some hardware improvements between the braveheart edition and KDE Community edition. For example the convergence functionality was added. Afaik the Manjaro and KDE edition will be using the same hardware.
> How is the development on such platform, the same a on Desktop GNU/Linux? Do we have a permission system similar to Android? Can we launch easily background application and awake the phone when needed (for notifications)? Is there a documentation on the packaging system?
The development for Plasma Mobile is similar to the one on the desktop. You can ever develop completely on the desktop or ssh in the phone and compile there. Packaging system is the same as on the desktop and depends on the distro. Flatpak also works as cross distribution solution ;)
KClock uses Powerdevil (the kde power management deamon) to wake up from sleep. There is also the KDED infrastructure: https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kded/html/index.html.
> How long can the battery last at the moment (with mostly idle phone)?
Good question. This varies a lot by the software used and the distributions. At the beginning it was less than 2 hours but with a lot of improvements in the kernel, there was reports varying from 12 to 16 hours idle time. This will probably improve further with more improvements in the kernel and in the hardware stack.
I hope this answers all your questions.
yes thanks a lot! I'm considering getting this phone to port the XMPP client I'm working on on FOSS mobile OSes.
My client (Salut à Toi) predates Kaidan by years and is not focusing only on instant messaging, also it's not the same technology stack and the mobile frontend uses Kivy, which is well adapted for touch screen.
What kind of collaboration is there between the various developers for the PinePhone? There seem to be a lot of Kernels with different patches for HW acceleration, IC power management, modem operation etc [1]. Do you apply these to your kernel?
My question is what the Plasma Mobile PinePhone ships with and if it maintained by the Plasma Mobile team themselves. The Plasma Mobile says that the Ubuntu Neon based one is "official" with confusing double quotes. The blog [2] says that image has been rebased on Ubuntu 20.04. Is this what the KDE PinePhone ships with? If so, what kernel does it use and are the patches I linked to previously included?
[1] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/get/ [2] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2020/11/12/plasma-mobile-updat...
When I briefly tried Neon on Wednesday, it was based on Ubuntu 20.04 and the 5.7 kernel if I remember correctly. Mobian is using kernel 5.9. I hope the pre-installed distribution will have an up to date kernel with latest patches. I also hope that it will be possible to install the latest versions of Plasma Mobile on Mobian in the near future too.
I'm not (I've even maintained distro spins). I am at a loss how anyone could read my question and think otherwise ;).
> I hope the pre-installed distribution will have an up to date kernel with latest patches.
That's precisely what I want to find out. I've seen so many blog posts and forum threads about different PinePhone builds. It's like the best and worst of Android ROM development from the XDA forums.
Different people seem to be hacking on different thing (which is fun) and many are attempting to get things upstreamed but the development seems to be all over the place. It's not clear what builds have safety features like the Power IC limits enabled for example.
I'm definitely not ;). Please reread my comment. If you know the answer to the question, please let me know.
What is the state of the phone call/sms/mms support in Plasma Mobile on Pinephone?
Also : will the CE edition be some sort of Neon mobile, or will it be based on PostmarketOS or something?
Calls are also working fine.
The only "exception" being one carrier in the USA does not seem to work with ofono (the underlying framework) yet, but that issue was also with the previous UBports edition.
https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/
But I am admittedly more familiar with the Phosh stack versus the KDE stack. Are you then using ofono and that is providing a working MMS support for the Pinephone?
(Sorry I am not trying to be confrontational, it would be amazing if MMS works!)
- The APN for mobile broadband needs to be the same for MMS (modemmanager does not have support for multiple APNs yet), and
- "transfer-route MT messages" aren't implemented (which some carriers use for MMS, but it is not clear for me to how).
The larger issue is that there is no stack on phosh to support any of this. I proposed a couple of ideas of how such as stack would work on their git site, but I don't have the time to impliment it.
From what I saw with scapebar, it does not have native support to send picture messages (MMS), does not recieve picture messages, and did not have a way to send a group message (MMS). I am admittedly not familiar enough with ofono to know what works or how it functions in the stack. However, there is MMS support in the patched ofono stack below:
Biggest question: Can I send SMS, on this phone, from another computer?
The biggest reason I ditched my iPhone for Android was the excellent implementation of in-browser messaging, to and from my phone, on any computer with a web browser.
I don't need to be able to text from "any computer with a web browser", but if I could send SMS from Win / Mac / Linux machines that I owned, that would be a huge incentive for me to give this platform a shot.
Barring that, sending a text is a simple one-liner in the terminal. Worst case, you can just run the command via ssh or whatever other workflow you may want.
I wonder if we'll reach a point where Anbox runs okay on the Pinephone, it seems super heavy. Anbox emulates a complete Android system after all...
Firefox sadly doesn't give us any ways to just use the web engine and do our own UI on top of it. It's a bit sad because Firefox is my preferred web browser on the desktop.
Even if I want to learn QML there is only so many things I could do in a day even if I want to. Plus JetPack Compose brings huge developer base to Plasma Mobile.
Android has an Hardware Abstraction Layer (Android HAL) that acts as a unique central clean definition of what the hardware provides and how to access it. It makes it easier for Android to remain HW agnostic and for HW vendor to be compatible with Android.
Is there a similar effort on Linux ?
There is a project called Halium that allowed in the early days to run plasma mobile on top of the Android userspace, but we stopped working on it when all the plasma developers got their Pinephone and this was easier to work with.
Now while I think the feature is cool, I'm not sure how useful it is. I don't really see myself using it and would prefer in almost all the case using my thinkpad with a good processor and plenty of RAM. This might change with future versions of the Pinephone getting more powerful with the time. For the moment, I'm happy to have the convergence of the applications with Kirigami, so that I only need to develop them once and use a similar interface on both my phone and laptop. And having KDE Connect to share stuff between my phone and my laptop.
For me the desktop capability of it is the most exciting thing. There are lots tasks i can do that don't require powerful cpu and lots of ram. I can even see myself developing in certain cases where i can just remote into a dedicated workstation - seeing what games mobile phones can run, it's not hard to imagine one can run a thing like vscode in client mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ
Enough for HN browsing, for sure. Even on a 1440p display.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyRm8kccyG4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHOgVmxH_dA
Other side of Allwinner SoC business is making TV box SoC (H* series of SoC), and it shows on A64 too.
It can do video playback at 60FPS HW scaled to larger 1440p displays, for example. Including audio over HDMI. This is already working with current gstreamer and kernel.
I am not sure how up to date Plasma Mobile is in these repos though. It's been a while since I tried it out.
I bet it would run really better.