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Comment by alexmcc81 | Hacker News Reader

Plasma Mobile is the desktop and related components (open to correction). There are apparently different distributions (based on Arch, Ubuntu and others [1]).

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...

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I think you might be confusing the Linux distribution with the desktop environment. "Plasma" and "Plasma Mobile" are examples of the latter, while "Ubuntu" is the former. One can switch desktop environments with a Linux distribution to customize its look and feel - e.g. if I install Ubuntu on my PC, I can choose Plasma (KDE's offering), Gnome, or XFCE to be my desktop environment. OTOH, I could also choose to install Arch Linux - a different distribution - and still choose between those same options (or more, I only listed 3) for a desktop environment to customize it.

I don't think the parent is confusing these notions. I don't know what distribution will be pre-installed on the KDE community edition, but the KDE project provides pre-built images based on Neon, which is Ubuntu with up to date KDE things on it. Plasma mobile also runs on Postmarket OS and Manjaro, and also Arch I think.

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 don't think the parent is confusing these notions.

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 think you might be confusing the Linux distribution with the desktop environment.

I'm definitely not ;). Please reread my comment. If you know the answer to the question, please let me know.

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