Librem 5 and KDE Plasma mobile

The Plasma developers we are talking to asked if we were attending Akademy this year, but we’re in a crunch period right now.

A bit of planning way in advance might have made it possible, though there was always the chance that people would have to cancel their trips at the last minute since we knew that we would be busy during Q3. :frowning_face:

Thanks for the reminder about Akademy, anyway! I must try to see if there are videos of the talks online. :smile:

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hier, since you appear to be related to the KDE/Plasma Mobil team, i’d love to read about:

  1. how has the work for the librem5 progressed so far from KDEs side?
  2. what is a good (specific) place to contribute to such work?

Thx.

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I can understand that. I think, some users will install Plasma Mobile and share theit expirience here. - I am not related to the Plasma Mobile team. I am a longtime Plasma/KDE user and use it on my librem13.

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FWIW those questions, especially the second, might be best answered by asking in the Plasma Mobile Matrix room or IRC:

https://www.plasma-mobile.org/join/

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I hope to see L5 Download option soon on the Plasma Mobile website, or even wonder if Purism will offer a KDE Plasma DE for PureOS on their phone. Anyone have any info to this?

https://www.plasma-mobile.org/get/

No Plasma Mobile on PureOS right now, sorry - Debian Buster (which is what PureOS Amber is based on) is simply a too old base to reasonably support Plasma Mobile.

I do hope that we’ll be able to offer Plasma Mobile with the switch to Byzantium though (the next release based on Debian Bullseye). Meanwhile, you can use other distros that already include PlaMo on your Librem 5, such as postmarketOS.

If such an architecture was offered by PureOS, would this be another option?
https://downloads.puri.sm/9/live/plasma/2020-08-06/

this is an experiental testing image for laptops. Like @dos stated above, plasma mobile would require a more recent version of Debian, either the current testing or unstable. In the future it would be possible

One day… Maybe in a few years. I use KDE Plasma and LXQt on my machines so having that much configurability, Qt applications, and the extra power of a future hardware setup.
:star_struck:

anyone try using KDE plasma mobile recently?

do apps work or fit differently than when using the default gnome or phosh?

Figured I would comment here instead of starting a new thread. Has anyone successfully deployed plasma mobile to the Librem 5 on PureOS recently? I know there are other options such as postmarketOS or Mobian that have methods for Plasma Mobile on their OS and I have enjoyed using it there, but unfortunately it seems somewhat difficult to get it working on Byzanium at this point.

I’ve tried slightly modified versions of the instructions here: https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Boards/HowTo/Install_Plasma_Mobile.html

Since buster is no longer available I moved to bullseye (which Byzantium is based on) and also testing repos and am able to successfully install all the packages required with both, but the login screen never appears. Before I continue down this rabbit hole, I’m curious if anyone else has managed to get this working.

@velocity303 did you ever manage to git plasma installed ?
I am very interested in using Plasma Mobile

No, not in PureOS, I could never get it to work properly. Because of this I used postmarketOS for a while but may give installing it on PureOS another try now since it’s been a few months since my last attempt. Maybe something has changed to make it more workable now.

How was your experience on Postmarket OS? Since I got over the initial fear of flashing the phone and restoring my data I have been curious to try it out.

@velocity303 I did try the instructions in the devkit but it seems that no longer works.
I also tried to follow the Mobian instructions but that errors out in unmet dependencies.

I did look into flashing the L5 device with postmarketOS so it would be very interesting to learn about your experience on postmarketOS.
I am a long time plasma user and bought the L5 to be able to run plasma-mobile as that was communicated early on that that was something that was actively prosued. Apparently this has changed.

My experience was OK, but it’s not as polished as PureOS is on the device. I prefer plasma mobile in regards to look and feel, but necessary things were somewhat glitchy.

For example the current version of plasma mobiles dialer does not hear any audio from the microphone. Also it has trouble remembering network settings sometimes. These are both known issues with bugs in their bug tracker but they have not seen much movement in the last few months. As such I’m switching back to PureOS just so I have more of the real functionality of the device back. I’m still hoping to land on plasma mobile in some form eventually

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Thank you for your write up on your experience. I do really agree with you regarding plasma mobile.
I would really like PureOS to support plasma mobile. But since the initial announcement years back nothing has been communicated :frowning:

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So this isn’t up to date anymore?

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Boards/HowTo/Install_Plasma_Mobile.html (linked from https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Software_Reference/Environments/PlasmaMobile.html )

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I tried using parts of instructions from mobian

sudo apt install -y curl
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
curl 'https://repo.mobian.org/mobian.gpg' | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt install plasma-mobile plasma-mobile-tweaks plasma-settings plasma-phonebook plasma-dialer spacebar angelfish okular-mobile

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.

purism@chonkyboi:~$ sudo apt install plasma-mobile plasma-mobile-tweaks plasma-settings plasma-phonebook plasma-dialer spacebar angelfish okular-mobile libwacom2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
libwacom2 is already the newest version (1.8-2).
libwacom2 set to manually installed.
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libegl-mesa0 : Depends: libgbm1 (= 21.2.6-1pureos4) but 22.3.6-1+deb12u1 is to be installed
 libwacom2 : Depends: libwacom-common (= 1.8-2) but 2.6.0-1 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

I have to find out how to force it, but I’m guessing it’s not supported by Purism for some reason (lack of personnel?). It feels like I’d have to install an alternative OS like postmarketOS or mobian to get it to work properly without forcing it.

That’s a very efficient way to break your system. Please don’t.

There’s no Plasma Mobile packaged for PureOS yet. It may be possible to install Plasma Mobile on the next version of PureOS (crimson) thanks to Debian upstream; it’s not feasible on Byzantium at all without putting a huge amount of work into packaging.

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