Plasma Mobile
plasma-mobile.org
plasma-mobile.org
The reference implementation is based on Ubuntu Touch, and use libhybris to get hw support. However, it's different from UT, by the fact that it's not using Mir, but Wayland directly through Kwin.
It seems to run Ubuntu Touch applications, X11 applications, KDE/QML ones and Jolla/Sailfish/Nemo ones. They seem to have Android apps on the roadmap too.
Except the drivers (through libhybris), everything is open source and numerous KDE/QML apps can run without modifications. It can also run without libhybris if you have kernel DRM.
The distribution is based on Kubuntu, and so far it works only on the Nexus 5.
I guess that if it works with Ubuntu Touch, like Nexus 4 or the Meizu.
Donations : https://www.kde.org/
Thanks for the support :)
This different from e.g. Firefox OS which relies on Android's SurfaceFlinger as display server, or Ubuntu Phone which uses their own Mir windowing system. The proprietary bits we rely on on a phone-by-phone basis (GPU drivers, radio) are abstracted away behind standard APIs (GLES) or Ofono, so all of this also runs on e.g. the desktop Mesa GL stack unmodified. The use of Kubuntu or systemd are incidental (the Kubuntu community has been a great aid!); nothing prevents any other distro from taking this - all on regular kde.org master branches slated for eventual release - and putting things together in the usual ways.
We also got full open governance and no mandatory central copyright assignment at kde.org, unlike some other open-ish phone projects.
As for convergence options -- plasmashell is in principle designed to be able to load and swap shell packages at runtime, while potentially retaining state. We're not quite there yet (e.g. because our Wayland bits are not up to supporting the full desktop just yet), but at some point we hope to allow you to dock your phone via HDMI, bring up Plasma Desktop on the attached monitor and e.g. retain your notifications.
Just a little nitpick, as far as I know Firefox OS is not using SurfaceFlinger but talking direct to the GL layer.
Sorry! FWIW, there's an old ZTE Open bought retail during a KDE event in Spain on this desk somewhere and I consider Firefox OS a a Very Good Thing. :)
Thanks for the kind words about Firefox OS. As soon as I get a hardware compatible with Plasma Phone, I am taking it for a spin :-D
Will you port to the Neo900 when it comes out?
I for one am really excited about this. I wrote about why on reddit[1].
Keep up the good work devs!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ejo62/plasma_mobile...
We should always support open/libre projects, as they makes us all richer, even if you dont directly use (or like) them
Cant wait to have a REAL linux in my pocket
I think we need a way to easily switch between fullscreen tabs, navigation between tabs and solid hardware acceleration for web stack.
There should be a way to run a device that's not controlled by Google, Apple or Microsoft; not just because you're "paranoid", but because you'd like to learn and contribute, and maybe come up with some cool ideas yourself.
Point in case, because it's open-source, you could work on those browser features you'd like to see on mobile systems.
Why's that? Android and iOS are available in their 2015 versions right now.
The experience, speaking as an n9 user who eventually moved to Android, was much more pleasant on the n9. The only problem was limited app selection.
Still in development but some really cool stuff like isolation of the modem.
Have you been thinking about the hardware problem in the long run? Jolla has apparently decided to leave the hardware business; I'm not sure where open-source mobile developers will get (guaranteed) hardware for their systems in the future.
Aye. There's been some overlap on both on code and manpower between Plasma Mobile and Sailfish, and the KDE community is a major contributor to upstream Qt[0,1], including to code used by all of us.
0 = http://pusling.com/blog/?p=362
1 = https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-s...
The biggest problem actually was getting graphics up and running to begin with, there were weird libhybris/Qt 5.4/QtCompositor incompatibilities that had me stumped for months, _until_ we decided to go for Kwin directly.
No reason for the crowd here to be so cynical, clearly they do have designers. For those holding the Apple flag, just compare the UI differences from Pixelmator and Mail.App to see there are many inconsistencies and that is fine, because different apps do different things.
For example, I can't read any of the text on the phone image on the front page, and physically the image on my screen is bigger than my iPhone. So the text is unreadable in the OS by default?
For example, look at the compact status bar: really small text and icons. Then look at the navigation icons on the bottom of the screen, the dialer tab icons, the contact pictures: all huge. But then there's the text next to each contact picture: tiny again.
Edit: In fact, where do the people interested in UI design actually meet and make their sausages in KDE? I can't seem to find a central place similar to http://design.canonical.com/
There is this gap between having the programming knowledge to 'submit a patch' and other kinds of large scale organisation/design skill.
Disclaimer: not me I'm a civilian.
And the UIs for all this stuff are going to be done in QML, and if you can do HTML and CSS QML is much easier and more intuitive. It puts all the animations, gestures, etc in the QML files and they have a visual designer in QtQuick so you don't actually need to write code at all if you don't want to.
"The goal of the KDE VDG is to create a central point for all visual design work – a one-stop for all KDE's visual design needs, if its logo's, icons, visuals, illustrations, launch pages, plasma themes or presentation and promo-material."
Above from the 'what' page on that site. Might be just my expectations but I read that Web site as being about branding and visual design rather than UI and workflows.
The 'who' page mini-bios do not appear to have anyone from a UI / workflow background - or is it that am I just out of date with the job titles that cover those skills these days?
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability
There appears to be a kde-usability group, but their mailing list archive is not public, you have to subscribe.
PS: Fedora 22 KDE spin does look really nice in my opinion.
For an early project, no, it's quite nice. They did not change a thing from QML apps, and it works fine already, without any design changes.
> The design is all over the place.
The design is clearly not all over the place, and is way better than any early Android or Ubuntu version. It's an early prototype.
This is open source -- you get to see how the sausage is made.
Seriously, KDE isn't new. Desktop has really shitty defaults, which is a major problem considering how many people don't know how to change the settings. I'm talking about "not a computer person" people, here.
Are you actually disagreeing, though? We both seem to agree it needs work. And you're correct the challenge is partly an institutional one -- recruiting and retaining design talent and manpower, and fashioning new ways of working together. It's something we're aware of and working on, and if you'd like to work on it with us we'll welcome you with open arms.
The KDE community isn't unaware of its weak spots and isn't satsified with its weak spots; addressing weak spots is Real Work[tm] though, and doesn't always happen over night. We'd like to think we've made some progress (for example we've identified some things that don't work from past attempts, and that's useful institutional knowledge as well), though. And that it's very much worth doing.
tl;dr If open source is bad at product design, we'd rather not accept that as law of nature and work out how to get better. If that's a challenge you have an appetite for ...
My corporation has a strict KDE/Qt-first policy for any linux apps, due to the useability and comfort that comes from a KDE desktop.
I still keep my users at KDE 4.x for now, because 5.x is not quite ready yet. but it's very close.
so, I guess this is me actually disagreeing with your actual disagreement.
Looking forward to seeing how this will work out! A replacement for Android is much appreciated.
"Plasma Phone OS (or simply Plasma Phone) is a complete software stack for mobile devices and includes the following libre technologies:
Plasma Mobile (a Plasma-based shell), KWIN/KWayland, Voicecall, Ofono, RIL, OHM, Telepathy"
Aside from Voicecall, I have no idea what these are or why they would be desirable in a phone.
Plasma is the KDE desktop shell. It recently released Version 5, which is very pretty and a lot of people like it. This is a mobile version of it, which I guess is similar to what the Plasma Active / Plasma Netbook projects were - reskins of the shell for smaller screens.
KWin is the KDE window manager. It recently got Wayland support, which is the next generation display protocol of the Linux desktop. Gnome also supports it now, so it will be replacing the 3 decade old Xorg server which is a security nightmare and major impediment to getting graphical GNU/Linux on more devices.
Ofono is a free software telephony library, so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to support phone calls on phones. Its part of why Android distributions are so different from Linux ones - each vendor provides the full telephony stack guts, and while Android provides call APIs pretty much every system component in the phone is a binary blob shipped on the stock ROM images that developers need to copy off to ship a custom ROM. Which is why you download one Ubuntu for x86_64 but there are dozens of Cyanogenmod images for all the devices they support.
Telepathy is a messaging framework used by Jolla, Gnome, and KDE. It supports a wide variety of protocols, from XMPP to SIP to libpurple (which means yahoo messenger / aim / msm support amongst others) and newer messaging providers like telegram or tox. You basically import the library and you can provide one UI to dozens of messaging / file transfer / voice or video call services.
Coming up short on what RIL or OHM are abbreviations for in this context, though.
Its basically a tech listing, mostly to say "this uses the stuff you already do rather than reinventing the wheel".
Tips:
- Add narration
- Keep the video under 3 minutes
- Use an attractive pair of hands in the demo
- Stick to high level features
The most important suggestion is adding narration. I had no clue why I was being shown some of these apps.
As an aside, KRunner is the best, most powerful and useful launcher I have ever used.
Doesn't Google have Voice Recognition APIs? Would it be alright to use their services in KDE?
Disclaimer: I contribute to kde.
As for contributing to KDE, it's not as fun as starting a new project, things move slowly, you have limited options of what you can do and I just generally don't agree with the mentality / philosophy / culture of the KDE project.
Mind if I ask what do you dislike about it?
Or what is your perception of the mentality/culture?
"Should we do this or that? I don't know, let's make it an option in the settings!"
Also, they seem to lack design taste.
So, in the end, you're just a troll. You have no facts, no knowledge, no reference but just your "feelings" about "bloat"; and you keep spitting on KDE's work.
I'm quite sure you've not used KDE since a long time.
UX is all about feelings and intuition by the way. Designing user interfaces is mostly trying to make users feel good while they're using it.
That's not how it happens.
It happens like this:
Person 1 creates something.
Person 2 wants slightly different behavior and provides a patch to make it configurable.
And you know what? Its not a bad thing.
My KDE is heavily configured and you have no idea how productive it is for me. I love it :)
Why do you think things move slowly? KDE releases Frameworks 5 every month, and Plasma 5 every 3 months, that's pretty fast in my opinion.
Stop thinking and actually do and ship!
You keep complaining and say you know better, then show us!
But their implementation of this philosophy seems to be - "don't think whether it's a good idea to put this button here, just make it an option in the settings". Which is clearly wrong.
Why is that?
Citation needed. From who? From where?
The latest KDE iteration has advanced in this regard in leaps and bounds, which is evident also in the favourable reviews it's seen. Just google for "plasma 5.2 review".
I can understand why this happens even though the outcome is often an unfriendly UI. Imagine you're a developer who's spent time and effort contributing to an open source project. Naturally you'll have an opinion on the UX and what suits your preferences. Everyone else using or contributing will also have a strong opinion. The moment you try and delgate visual and interaction design to a small, dedicated team is the moment the whole project generates enormous resentment from the "community".
Plus, any attempt to (sincerely) improve or simplify an interface will always be met at some point with the charge of "dumbing down".
Open source and design have never had a good relationship. I wish it were otherwise, but I don't know how it could be made better.
- Mismatched visual styles: when you tap the phone icon, you get a bar of three icons. Two are simple line icons (History and Contacts), the third is a detailed picture of a keyboard to denote keypad. A minor thing and easily fixed.
- Interface inconsistencies: I noticed that a large red X is used for closing a screen (which I like over the sometimes unclear Back button behaviour you get in Android). But at 3:16 in the video the Wallpaper screen has a 'close' button (with X) and below that in the tab bar is the larger red X for closing too. So you have two close functions on the same screen. You see the same duplication on the date and Time screen at 3:41. By the way, I think the way Windows Phone lets you change date and time is much nicer. It's a similar spinner approach to Plasma but less cluttered. Here's a video of it in action: https://youtu.be/kIsWgCX7qtE?t=54s
Also, the commands 'close', 'cancel' and 'delete' all tend to use the same X icon in many UIs so if there is no label for X, then it's meaning (and behaviour) should be consistent across the OS.
- Weather app: there is a 'hamburger' menu on the left and another slimmer hamburger menu on the right. They feel too similar visually. Presumably, the right-hand menu is equivalent to the overflow menu you find on Android. But are two menus needed here? Could they not all sit in one menu?
Obviously, this is a beta and these are relatively minor points. I can see some influence from Android, which is fine - there's no doubt that Google, Microsoft and Apple all study and are influenced by each others work. I just hope the OS stands up well as a unique UI rather than just a clone of bits from other OSes.
Overall, it looks quite polished for a version 1.0 and I hope the project succeeds. I would love to see an open source project take the lead in design/UX over existing projects.
For some people, that will seem really jarring and uncomfortable.
Those are what the VDG has made so far, there have been UI mockups for a lot of software from the file manager to software center that are leaps and bounds better than what are in place, but the manpower in general KDE is really lacking to keep up with the VDG's mockups to actually implement them.
Both Android and iOS are horrible when it comes to easy of use and know what you are doing in my opinion. Everyone using those systems ends up just using a bunch of patterns of clicking and swiping that they repeat every time, because they don't know which of the things they just did actually causes the effect they wanted.
In my opinion UI/UX are huge research fields, which you can see when you look at how the paradigms and "dogmas" from two years ago are now known to be the exact opposite of what you want. I think the only reasons things appear easier these days is that people have been exposed to technical interfaces way longer and more intensely.
I am not saying that things don't get better, but I think there are a lot of misunderstandings. Users just get used to certain systems after time. They adapt. They adapt to their CLI-based interface, their Macbook (they need too, else they'd have spent thousands of USD for nothing), to new versions of Windows and do KDE/Plasma.
Show a completely new computer user (maybe generation 70+) various interfaces and they will learn each of them efficiently after a while. (yeah, I have done that with older people)
I think the main thing stopping people from using KDE and having troubles with it is that it's not the common thing that one usually starts out with. It used to be and people were happy until KDE4, which was something new to learn again.
This sounds way more defensive of KDE than I intend to. I am not a fan. I use it when I have to choose between Gnome/Unity or KDE (but would probably choose another option, if there is one), just because it feels way more intuitive and easier to use. I never managed to get along with Gnome, but I think that's all based on what I said above. If you are exposed to one thing you will probably stick to it.
However, I am happy about every alternative coming up, because it means there is a chance for them improving status quo.
I'm going to disagree with you there. I've seen toddlers use the iPad. My 60 year old aunt who never 'got' Windows (even simple things like managing application windows, or figuring out where files go after being downloaded), figured out iPad in about a day.
Same goes for elderly people with no previous computer experience. They have no prior familiarity, so they'll learn whatever is given. Of course they'll have natural preferences for one UI style over another, but many of them use WIMP just fine.
It's all a matter of preference and the user's threshold for degree of control. For a person like me, Android is a UX disaster and a regression. It took me half an hour to figure out how to delete a photo from the Gallery as I ended up finally descending into the proper File Manager directory, holding on the filename and selecting the Trash icon.
A convoluted and awkward workflow by all means. I agree with the parent poster that Android usage is a cargo cult ritual of swiping and touching, both from my experience with it and observing how other people use it.
Can you give some examples?
I think the main reason that smartphones still work is that that most people use them in a really reduced way. One could argue for feature hiding, which is a good thing. However hiding I think means "moving it out of the way" and not "make sure nobody finds it".
I am not saying that Android and iOS are bad, but more that there is room for improvement. It's good to see new projects doing things a bit different. I always found it weird when people complained about copying. I don't think that's bad, but right now there doesn't seem to be a lot of progress. I like how KDE at least tries to do things a bit different instead of copying without understanding why someone designed their UX a certain way. Not every design works for every project/product.
I've also heard a lot good about Windows Phones, even though this caused fewer apps that really integrated. It's great when Microsoft tries new stuff, like in Windows 8. Yeah, it didn't work out, but the UX designes that sometimes are called innovative don't seem to be on par with the amount of research going into other fields of the big OSs. It may also be due to the market settling, but there is still room for improvements, so I hope it's not stagnating. It would be great to see other players.
I know different styles make thins harder for people doing cross-platform applications. Sticking to status quo makes things easier, but it also leads to stagnation and it feels like KDE4 and Windows 8 made a lot of people scared of trying out new stuff.
I'm hopeful that Visual Design Group will have polished the UI/UX even better for the phone form factor, by the time the distribution becomes stable.
I had high hopes for their new visual design effort, but in my opinion the new Plasma 5 theme looks like a really, really bad OS X Yosemite ripoff. (Which is ironic, since Yosemite came afterwards.)
Some history, Plasma Active is about five years old now and its development coincided with a would-have-been-crowdfunded-toay tablet called Vivaldi that was supposed to be an open hardware device that never panned out because costs got out of control and interest waned.
It was based on Mer, rather than Kubuntu, and Qt4 rather than 5. Today it looks like a colossal wreck, and all the "Active" app UIs developed for it are all complete wastes of code and time today because QML was not mature enough when they made that "first attempt". Today there are common themed QML elements called the qt-quick-controls that everyone can use to build UIs that adapt to every devices native toolkit, while still supporting animations and flow elements and all the nice graphical perks hardware accelerated UIs allow.
Its been basically dead in the water for over two years, since the tablet project went belly up, and there even used to be a "Kubuntu-active" fork of Kubuntu that the project was maintaining as a way to try out the Plasma Active desktop on top of a Kubuntu core. The shell from Plasma Active did eventually see use in its adoption as the "netbook" interface found in Plasma 4 near the end of its lifecycle.
So you definitely want some post-mortum on the last KDE mobile attempt and you also want to consider how Plasma Mobile might succeed or fail in a similar vein.
Why did Plasma Active basically never do anything? Number one, no device support. It was not targeting phones at the time, and was instead looking towards tablets, but it never even ran properly on a Nexus 7 and those only turned up while it was on the decline. Without hardware, software is useless. This time around Plasma Mobile is shipping for the Nexus 5 out of the gate, a significant improvement. If they can make images for popular dev phones for a while, they will certainly have more potential devs than Active ever did, which pretty much amounted to building and running the shell in a child Kwin to tinker with, but never use on an actual device.
Number two, its UI was a wreck. This was before the KDE VDG, Breeze, and Material Design were a thing, so Plasma Active was built on ugly Oxygen and Active Apps were made with effectively prototype QML1 where you had to write your own button class. As a result, all the apps not made for Active (and most weren't, since it was dead in the water) were their desktop versions and unusable on small touch screens, and all the Active apps looked like you drew some rectangles on a white background you could click because that is literally how you made buttons in QML1.
Plasma Mobile does improve on this as well. Breeze, the new KDE theme, beats the pants out of their older defaults. They now have a KDE font, and a KDE icon theme meant to encompass everything, that are all consistent. they now have their visual design group making mockups and directing design for new apps and old, though there is an obvious schism between designers making mockups and anyone actually implementing them - there is an amazing Muon design that was never implemented into the final product which looks and feels like butt. And not a single core KDE app in the KDE Software releases is shipping a QML2 powered UI that is meant for mobile that uses a common design language like Material. It means all the core KDE apps - Kontact, Dolphin, whatever web browser you want to use (Rekonq is dead, Konqeror is a zombie, and there are several new projects out there - for mobile, you might be able to get away with a dumb qtwebengine wrapper), Amarok (which also has another amazing VDG UI floating around that is still unimplemented), Dragon Player, etc. They all need mobile UIs, none of them have them now, and you wouldn't even want to make a mobile UI, you would want to make adaptive UIs - you would want all these programs to be able to scale from phone size to desktop size and readjust their layouts accordingly, because that is what QML2 is really good at. Its also a complexity nightmare, if anyone has tried a responsive website, albeit QML2 does so much of a better job equipping you with the tools to do that its almost not comparable.
Lastly, Plasma Active never had an app store. At all. Muon was still in its infancy back then, so you were using... Apper. Which is basically a worse Synaptic package manager, and Synaptic does not belong in the same room as a mobile phone UI. The newer appstream infrastructure and the future xdg-app tech should be great when it lands, but like I said before Muon is still a mess, though maybe that responsive adaptive UI redesign will also bring the VDG designs to the forefront finally and make it really great.
But Plasma Mobile supporting Ubuntu Touch Apps, Sailfish Apps, Firefox OS HTML5 apps, and Android apps with slashtik will definitely solve the app problem. Security might become a problem, then, though. You are now mixing debs, click packages, apks, app manifests, and RPMs from Sailfish on one system. Sounds like a giant mess. So do you just containerize everything? Good luck with that limited mobile phone storage and memory size. How does apparmor integrate with that mess? How about how Muon integrates knewstuff content from kdelook and kdeapps - those are literally just zipfiles it extracts into predetermined locations.
A lot of questions, but as long as they don't go over their heads and stay within their manpower - which if Active is any indication is that you really just need a core base working great before trying to take over the world - it should have much more potential than the last KDE foray into mobile.
The dream, of course, is that Sailfish / Ubuntu Touch / Firefox OS all eventually rebase off Plasma Mobile and just provide their own UI shells over it, so that all the major open source mobile players are working in one ecosystem rather than working in their own trees at their own companies not trying to play ball with the competition. Good luck with that one.
The footers and list styles seem to have had a minor fender bender too.
Quite the birthday these two sites have.
Source: I work at Spotify.
They could have at least changed the colors :)
But still gl and keep hacking.
Why?
What drawbacks, again?
So it's a full stack, and you can run apps from a variety of (Qt-based) sources on it. It also has a few phrases like
ENJOY NEW USER EXPERIENCE
ADAPTABLE USER INTERFACE
Focus on mobile devices.
FREE OS FOR YOUR PHONE
Uhh, okay? Oh, and the video shows that the phone is basically an Android clone. Great.
I can't talk about the other person, but if I'm being negative it's because this has a really hype-ey 6-minute trailer advertising nothing of interest. Rule of thumb: Your trailer should never be more than two minutes, because otherwise it's probably really damn slow, and frankly a minute is pushing it.
This must be some of the worst UI/UX I've seen in a while.
Even if the GUI would be perfect and much better than android or iOS (which I greatly doubt, simply because of the man hours that went into those projects) there are two big things missing. An ecosystem of apps+apis and IMO even more important: sandboxing.
Applications having access to basically everything just doesn't fit anymore today. It would have made much more sense to concentrate on these technologies and get sandboxing on the desktop, as all the competitors are also still struggling with that.
There's also Limba : https://github.com/ximion/limba
p.s. This is my understanding as simple end-user.I might be wrong.
p.s. Targeting does not only imply earning money.
Remember Android is "strategy" for Google, "point" is to bring more and more people to cloud/internet.thats why Android as software developed and available from Google for free.
One way or the other, open-source software should run on mobile to remain relevant in the future, and I think we should be supportive to those projects and people who try to build some momentum, often with minimal resources.
That, and xdg-app is a thing. They will probably just use those. But there are a lot of ways to do sandboxing of apps on modern Linux.