KDE Plasma Mobile 21.07
plasma-mobile.org
plasma-mobile.org
I also like that the podcasts app is responsive (in the web sense). I was originally excited about Linux on phones because I want to use the same software on my devices whether large or small. If I used this app on my phone, I‘d want to use it on the desktop as well. I strongly believe this is where software is going (only 10 years after the web) and highly welcome it.
Interestingly, Linux is extremely competitive with the other ecosystems in this regard due to Apple’s cautious approach and Microsoft appearing to be asleep at the wheel again.
The Linux phone may be here earlier than many of us think.
e.g. There are several threads on Memory, CPU hogging issues with dolphin(even when not indexing). Plasma shell related issues like icons go missing etc.
Obviously inspite of that, KDE is still a great option for those looking for a stable and fully featured Linux desktop environment.
Stability/resource usage wise I didn’t have many issues in the Wayland session at all, though. Seems like they’ve improved that a lot in the past years.
I don’t use KDE for multiple reasons anymore, but I like how it usually understands what an advanced user wants to do, which no other DE really seems to. I massively appreciate that and have some hope they’ll get their act together in those areas eventually.
The fix is to manually change the mtp actions[1], which is known for over 7 years but not actually fixed.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/21sloi/thought_this_mi...
My earlier misconceptions regarding Gnome seems to because of default integrations on some distros, But vanilla gnome on arch seems to be robust, functional and is indeed beautiful.
(I’m hoping to move to a Linux phone when my old iPhone finally bites the dust.)
I ended up going with Mobian and Phosh. I even installed ARM VS code on it but it was so slow like 5 second lag per click.
Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card. I don't know why, it worked before. The battery also dies too fast even in airplane mode sitting on my desk. And then of course the lack of apps and the Phosh UI is not that great imo, I don't know why they went with the design of the vertical split when finding apps. Maybe they can't match the gestures and what not that Android/iOS has.
Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time.
As far as your actual question there are a couple of people on Reddit that are using it as a daily driver. [1] this is a little old though.
As for why VS Code my fantasy is the Samsung Dex idea however I'm not going to drop $2K on a flagship cellphone. The Pinephone is not that strong but I was looking to get a Qemu VM running on it that would neat.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/kxgtlu/pine...
I don't know up to you the hardware is bad compared to a modern phone for the same price.
Granted for what it is and comparing to say Librem, it is cheap.
In the end I want to believe in it, would suck to only have two OS options.
Hm...that is odd, assuming you are still on Mobian/Phosh. Assuming you tried standard debugging, this page gives you some avenues for help: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php
The matrix channel for Mobian is very active, and there are plenty of folks there who can help debug that.
Purism to my knowledge uses that for development, not tech support. They also tend to not give accounts to their gitlab unless they know who you are (i.e. a Pinephone dev, active on their Matrix Channel, etc.)
I think your best bet, depending on the underlying issue, is to hop on the Matrix channel for help.
Yeah I was trying to get in there to develop but I will admit I would be pretty useless.
Thanks I will get this phone working again, good to know there is a community, I have posted on the Pine64 forums a few times, got some info there.
I do a majority of my Pinephone related development on Gitlab. It hasn't stopped adoption for my work at all. Others use Github/Sourcehut.
The nice thing is that developing for the Mobian is nearly identical as it is for Debian (I use the Modem quite extensively for my apps, so I have to use the Pinephone for testing).
> but I will admit I would be pretty useless.
Everyone starts somewhere! The Pinephone is really my first dabble into open source development, and now one of my apps are on quite a few distros. The community is incredibly welcoming and helpful.
> Thanks I will get this phone working again,
Good luck! If the Mobian channel is a dead end, you can also find me on Matrix too.
How was the app deployment, I have been told there's different ways to go about it, the "apt install" way being harder since your app has to be vetted and what not, understandable.
It's just as far as "barrier to entry" for users that's one of the things that could be problematic if there isn't just an app store they go to.
A few things (You can find them all here: https://gitlab.com/kop316/ )
- A backend MMS client to enable use of MMS on the Pinephone
- I am helping to merge MMS front end support to Chatty (the default Phosh MMS/SMS Client): https://source.puri.sm/kop316/chatty/-/tree/wip/sadiq/mm-acc...
- A full stack Visual Voicemail Client.
> And why pursue Pinephone, is it the privacy aspect or potentially new fledging OS that may get a good market share... or just full linux being cool.
It's a mix of those. I am a big open source advocate, and a huge believer in the fact that hardware I buy is hardware I should be able to use as I see fit. I will never buy an iPhone (for myself, sadly I feel Android is in such a sad state that the only phone I feel confident getting for my family right now is an iPhone) for the above stated reasons (and the fact that they intentionally segment their market to force you to buy an iPhone/Apple products to use "their ecosystem", and make it very difficult to use services that compete with said ecosystem). Stock Android likewise intentionally cripples the Android experience unless one uses Google Play services (I am aware of MicroG....but it is difficult to install unless one rolls their own OS, which I don't want to do). This is to say nothing of the Branded Android devices which range from okay to outright malicous, and the practices of app developers to force you to install their apps to suck up as much info on you as possible.
I am also very tired of the forced obsolescence of Mobile Phones, and the Pinephone/Librem 5 is an honest effort to move past that. I have a stack of phones that are perfectly useable aside from the fact that they run something like Linux 3.10 or 3.18 (which the kernel itself is subject to a wide range of security issues, say nothing of using Android n-2 on it).
> How was the app deployment, I have been told there's different ways to go about it, the "apt install" way being harder since your app has to be vetted and what not, understandable.
I try to work within the distribution channels, but one can distribute through Flatpak (I don't presonally do that, so I have no idea how hard it is) which to my knowledge works on most distros. As far as distribution channels, someone will have to package/champion your app for a particular distribution, and depending on how popular/necessary it is, it will probably end up being you (that's the case for me on Mobian/Debian. I am the dev and package manager for my apps, but someone else has been packaging the MMS related stuff for pmOS, Pure OS, and Fedora).
Your app will be vetted yes...but it is not the Apple/Google "I alter the terms of your agreement, pray I do not alter further", it is more "Do you follow good practices in coding? Do you follow the packaging standards in our distribution? Will you be around in two months to keep maintaining this app". The only reason I would outright see them willfully not distribute your app is if you act maliciously. Honestly, after working with the Debian Maintainers to include mmsd-tng into Debian, I have a much higher confidence in the quality of packages included in Debian.
> It's just as far as "barrier to entry" for users that's one of the things that could be problematic if there isn't just an app store they go to.
I think the biggest barrier to entry is distro maintainers do not want to add an app to their distribution to have it abandoned, which is unfortunately a chicken and egg problem for a new dev (that is at least how I preceieved it when I was working on getting mmsd-tng included into Debian. I think I will have an easier time getting vvmd/vvmplayer included since I now have "street cred"). The distribution maintainers want to see you succeed (they actively helped me learn how to package my app in Debian), but they (and I) have seen plenty of instanses where someone wants to help, then disappear a week later (which is fine, it just makes it hard to judge who will stay and who will go).
why is a backend needed for MMS? is it not direct like phone > cell tower > phone?
That's cool with the purism work.
> A full stack Visual Voicemail Client
Just don't embed ads in it like Android ha
> MicroG
I have not heard of that
I just hate the bloatware it is particularly a problem on cheaper phones and part of the carrier eg. Boost they have these notifications you can't get rid of, that's the stuff that "boils my blood".
Heh I have a stack of phones too, I bought an old Windows Lumia device just because I used to really like it despite that all the app APIs are broken on it sadly.
Interesting info about the deployment stuff. Yeah someone pointed out if your app is like a basic to do list probably not going to get added.
There's also the name thing... like I feel pretty confident doing apt install filezilla that I actually get the FTP client.
Anyway good luck to you, maybe I'll see you in this field ha whenever I get back into this. My Pinephone is currently just sitting on my desk uncharged.
I gotta check out Matrix too have not really heard of it, offhand I'm like "is it like Mastodon" or something... but yeah.
You're welcome!
> why is a backend needed for MMS? is it not direct like phone > cell tower > phone?
The MMS stack is....interesting. It is a mix of SMS and HTTP (SMS acts as a signalling to the client (phone) to tell the client an MMS exists, and HTTP is used to get/send an MMS), and MMS has its own encoding scheme. mmsd-tng is an abstraction layer to do MMS decode/encode and send/recieve it all, so a chat application just has to talk to mmsd-tng to get/send MMS.
There is a modem Abstraction layer (the two popular ones are oFono and MOdem Manager), and neither support MMS natively. However, with mmsd-tng, they don't need to.
(visual voicemail is the same way, except it uses IMAP...yes email IMAP for downloading voicemails)
> Just don't embed ads in it like Android ha
haha. My GUI isn't exactly pretty, but it works! Plus if I went crazy and did that, it's pretty easy to fork my work.
> I just hate the bloatware it is particularly a problem on cheaper phones and part of the carrier eg. Boost they have these notifications you can't get rid of, that's the stuff that "boils my blood".
This is sadly why I steer my family to getting iPhones, despite my personal misgivings of Apple.
> Interesting info about the deployment stuff. Yeah someone pointed out if your app is like a basic to do list probably not going to get added.
A lot of devs are volunteers as well, so the dynamics of the "app store" is much different. I personally think the biggest issue is making sure apps just don't get abandoned. If you really don't want to use official distro channels, flatpak seems to be the way to go (but you can build your own apt repository too if you really want to).
> Anyway good luck to you, maybe I'll see you in this field ha whenever I get back into this. My Pinephone is currently just sitting on my desk uncharged.
Thanks! I'm not hard to find on Matrix
> I gotta check out Matrix too have not really heard of it, offhand I'm like "is it like Mastodon" or something... but yeah.
I liken Matrix to "IRC on steriods" or "Slack without the vendor lockin". It's a group chat with different servers and channels.
That's interesting, guess it makes sense.
> email IMAP for downloading voicemails
That's interesting as well
Well it sounds like you're working on something that helps make the Pinephone more usable so thanks for that. I was "shocked" when seemingly basic things like video recording was not a guarantee/kinda special. I've ran into Megous here before where he was writing his own video recorder with ffmpeg straight up like dang.
Cool yeah I'm gonna check Matrix out have not heard of it before till now.
Thanks! It's been very rewarding honestly. The community is great, and I have met some folks in the community who I would now consider friends.
> I was "shocked" when seemingly basic things like video recording was not a guarantee/kinda special. I've ran into Megous here before where he was writing his own video recorder with ffmpeg straight up like dang.
Yeah, the linux phone software landscape is a lot different now than it was even six months ago. A lot of it is because of the developers who volunteered to roll up their sleeves and help. I think Pine64 did a great thing in making the phone as cheap as possible and democratized the development process.
Purism has been putting a lot of money into developing the software too, and really cannot understate how much that has helped as well.
You might want to have a look at libhandy[1] for GTK/GNOME, to "build GNOME applications scaling from desktop workstations to mobile phones".
(My experience is on Mobian/Phosh with a Pinephone, YMMV)
As a basic phone (Calls/SMS/etc), it works pretty well. Voicemail works, but depending on your carrier, you may not get a notification for it. There is a Visual Voicemail client in the works, but that still has a bit to go before it could be considered for daily usage.
The camera HW isn't very good, so if you want to take really nice pictures, you would need to have something else to take them. Email/Telegram works well. Signal requires a third party client (which I haven't really tried). There are a few games you can install, but most are basic (2048, Chess, etc.). Running Android specific apps is possible, but not very usable from my experience.
Web browsing can be slow (Firefox can take a while to load).
Convergence is really neat...but I don't really use it since I have a laptop. Mobian is nice in that any Debian package will happily install/run (but YMMV on how well it works on mobile).
I have found postmarketOS + Phosh, Arch Linux ARM (dreemurrs) + Phosh, and Ubuntu Touch (all via https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/) to each be considerably more not-simply-broken; they’re merely—ah—“minimal”, that’s what I’ll call it. I haven’t yet tried KDE Plasma under a different distribution, but will eventually, because fairness demands it.
I know they said this stuff wasn’t ready to be a daily driver for any but serious enthusiasts, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as I found it.
I’m still going to persist. I am discouraged, but not dissuaded.
Respectfully, your experience sounds like what I had between when I got my Pinephone and last month (or so). It has since improved for me quite dramatically.
1. The keyboard just won't open ~50% of the time. I had to do all sorts of hacky things to get it to open
2. The web browser Angelfish is no where near fully featured. The one good thing is that it has a built in adblocker.
3. For about a month whenever I restarted the phone it would be completely black. I had to bring it into a dark room and plug it in for me to be able to barely see anything. Then I could raise the brightness. An update fixed this
4. A lot of the apps just don't open
5. All sorts of random bugs/missing features, in the music player, the file explorer, etc.
This isn't a bad thing. It is a work in progress and I hope that it will continue to improve. Ubuntu Touch has worked the best for me.
[1] https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/advantages-of-ph... [2] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/roadmap/
This is a nice course. Please keep moving in that direction. Hopefully this also signifies a move to greater care for UI in general, i.e. more considerations regarding UX and fixing UI glitches.
Exciting stuff. With KwinFT now using wlroots and this course continuing, Plasma could be a really great DE in a few years.
* The UI could be more consistent, some windows (Elisa, AudioTube) have blurred backgrounds, but most don't
* The icons look dated because of the 3D shapes
I think as it is, this targets an extremely niche audience who might not care for these things. I know this would be much more persuasive for me with a slick UI, being able to run desktop class apps on a mobile sized device would be awesome.
If I were to guess, they took the screenshots on a laptop/desktop.
I wish it would reach the polish level of Windows or MacOS.
The spacing in the settings menu in the final screenshot is horrible too, the text gap sizes just change for no reason and the design has two layers of headers that aren't visually distinct enough.
Also look at the dialer[1], long inputs there are not that likely, but it still sucks that the numbers are behind the scroll bar.
Don't get me wrong. Last time I used KDE was some 5-6 years ago. These small inconsistencies were a lot more common, and back then for me it meant it's unusuable. I've been following KDE development, from the screenshots I've seen, it has come a long way. There are nowhere near as many inconsistencies as there used to be back then.
[0] https://plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-update-ju...
[1] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat...
Most KDE design is actually pretty consistent, but the design language just doesn't sit well with me. I'll stick to Gnome/Phosh if Linux on phones ever becomes popular.
For me, the defaults of typical KDE desktops have been wonderful during KDE 3 and KDE 5 cycles.
Ubuntu was the only Gnome centric distro that I used that was at times better.
I can't but a finger on exactly what but dull and uninspired feels very close.
Edit: as for Mac I used it for 3 years and while I support devs who want it I never got it. At least back when I used it there seemed to be an informal rule that any popular app had to have a gear icon (some had two) thrown into the user interface by a drunk dev.
I'm actually serious here, this was my experience: I could never understand why some had the gear in the bottom left corner, others somewhere else.
Windows used to be more boring and polished but now have 2 or 3 different control panels. Ironically I like Windows more than before though.
Maybe because Windows is becoming less dull and I'm becoming more dull?
- The proportions are inconsistent.
- There are way too many icons; I generally dislike this Linux GUI convention that every button must have an icon on the left. These icons add no information, they just make the whole thing look more busy.
- Sometimes there are shadows, but sometimes there aren't. You have to pick one or the other. And if you pick the other, you'd want borders because there needs to be a visual hierarchy either way.
- Sharp corners and small shadows don't work well together.
I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I've seen way too many people make these same mistakes when designing UIs.
Gnome does look more polished, and it's maybe nice to use with a touchscreen, but they're being weird by optimizing everything for touchscreens yet positioning it as a laptop/desktop DE.
Apple does it more sparingly (now), and fairly consistently: as a product line evolved. The iMac line did it when it was "cool", the iPod was the next one, and the iPhone evolved from the iPod so it made a lot of sense (and thus so did iOS). There's not really anything else Apple names this way. Apple TV, Macbook, Airpods, Safari... Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. It's also not a particularly "pretty" letter and you end up with names that are either purposeful misspellings, midKapitalized, are plain bad puns, or occasionally and at best, are merely oKay.
KDE does not have a great brand. Apple does.
It might also be interesting to note that Apple licenses iOS from Cisco [0].
[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_io...
Also, Apple no longer has iLife or iTunes, and "iWork" is no longer a bundle, but even if it was, its apps are Pages, Keynote and Numbers. No "i"s there.
They use the "i" prefix more sparingly now, as the original post said.
I've never heard of iLife, iTools, iWeb, iWork or iSight so its use in flagship products is even more sensibly sparing.
iTunes has been replaced by Apple Music, and possibly iMovie too???
It's also worth noting Apple has been somewhat mocked got their overuse of i. Despite the sparing use. So KDE tacking it onto everything is even less sensible in this context.
I think the K naming has probably hampered adoption of KDE products in the long term: I was always resistant to install K* apps when I was using a non-KDE desktop due to compatibility paranoia, something I tended not to even consider when installing gnome/gtk apps for example (which tend mostly not to be prefixed with g or gtk- or similar)
The i-branding was very, very effective. Apple was one of the very few brands that really managed to "own" the internet in the mind of the average consumer. Which is one of the reasons it was wildly successful.
The new branding, in comparison, is meh. They now just leverage "Apple". Nothing else, because they think they are too good. Creating new brands is difficult and risky, so they just don't do it because "we don't need it".
It's a sign of decadence, and you can see it in the history of all corporate behemoths. Once Microsoft became huge, everything became "Microsoft This" or "Windows That" - they stopped making bets, and just leveraged their established brands. The rebirth was a fountain of fresh brands: Azure, Surface, Office365.
"Apple Music" and "Apple TV" are one of the many symptoms of a culturally-dying corporation. Like Microsoft, they will continue to be fabulously rich for decades, maybe score the occasional win like the move to ARM. But the new booms will come from elsewhere.
Neither is what KDE are doing with their persistent k* prefix: it's not decadent nor innovative. It's just stagnant.
The one thing that keeps me in the *nix universe is the ability to pick and choose my desired software (and hardware ofc) without being influenced by iMarketing. I really dont care if KDE has a poor brand as long as it does its job well.
In this case. The more users and interest in KDE/Plasma, the better for the whole environment and the developers.
According to Wikipedia, however there is no citation.
https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Ia...
Not really. The main desktop/interface, i.e. that users spend most time looking at, is called Plasma. The file manager, another high-usage application, is called Dolphin. The theme is Oxygen/Breeze.
Claiming 'everything has got to have a K' is about a decade out of date. Sure there are still things like KClock, KRunner, KWin, etc. but they mostly seem to be very old projects, from back when 'everything has got to have a K'. Others, like Konqueror, Kontact, etc. seem like pretty reasonable names.
No longer true. But nobody wants to rename well known apps like Konsole to Terminal , Kate to "Text Editor".
Also, the original comment did not say anything about Apple. Stop trolling.
(Sorry couldn't resist, I know many apps just have a normal name with a K prepended.)
That said, some/any name is vastly preferable to just "camera". If you have a question about the app how are you supposed to google for that? You start searching for "apple camera app" at which point that might as well be its name.
Anyway, the Keverything is a copy of the Xeverything, and both are for practical reasons since they point to the requirements to run the software.
Knames are mostly ok, a user knows right from package list if this app is meant for his environment, or rather not. Same with gApps. The name tells what the app does. Why would I be mad at this?
They have some great pieces of software but marketing wise it looks like they don't want to go beyond their Kusers.
This is my opinion anyway.
It's not at all hard to pronounce. It's my second language yet still spelling and clock was things I was taught in kindergarten. There was also this weird cartoon [1] about green monster eating clocks.
Make some proposals.
It's surprisingly hard to find actual packet/binary name of the app while actually using it. Modern Linux apps love to hide it, good luck if you use a proper translation. Everything is called "Editor" or "file manager" etc.. I have to use "ps" to figure that out.
"how do I do X with Nautilus/Epiphany/Totem"
Probably it's just me, though: at that time I was working at a company with a name starting by V. The product name itself also started by V. We used the C++ Qt framework, where every class starts with Q. So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter.
That can be usefull, you know by looking at a class name , if it starts with Q is a native Qt stuff, and if it starts with V is your own custom stuff. As an example if you would see a VDropDown you will know that some of the developer in the company was asked to "improve" the native dropdown , you should check if there are bugs there.
However I don't think it's a good idea, nor pretty or attractive, that such a technical decision transpires to the public facing side of the project: first and foremost, its name.
In the associated articles you can see the user-facing name for kclock is "Clock": https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat...