Hi all,
as we are all eagerly waiting or already having our Librem 5s in our hands, I would like to also share some videos I found regarding Plasma Mobile which is now on the PinePhone KDE Community Edition:
Plasma Mobile + Manjaro on Pine Phone:
Plasma Mobile Convergence on Pine Phone:
KDE Community Edition Blog Post:
Kind regards
As a big fan of KDE Plasma on desktop, I would be all over this in a universe where the L5 didn’t exist.
Plamsa Mobile is looking good and for sure I’ll play with it more on my L5, but Phosh is the most popular DE on PinePhones for good reasons. I do hope Plasma Mobile continues to grow and improve though.
What is holding it back? Is it simply development work where GNOME&Purism&co have been able to put in more hours of work, or is there something else like the extent to which Plasma Mobile can make use of existing desktop environment components? Is there something corresponding to libhandy for the Plasma Mobile case?
Sorry if those are silly questions, I know almost nothing about KDE or Plasma, I just know it’s not GNOME, it’s rather some kind of alternative to GNOME, I think?
KDE Plasma, the desktop DE, is kind of like GNOME, yes. Same with XFCE, Mate, Pantheon, and many others. Different look and feels, different workflows, different people working on them. All accomplish mostly the same thing though.
I’ve never tried this site personally, but you can test a distro running KDE Plasma (among many others) at this site: https://distrotest.net/KDE%20neon
Just if you’re curious.
Plasma Mobile, on the other hand, is quite good, but Phosh is excelling, as people have pointed out here, probably mostly due to Purism’s corporate backing.
Phosh is paid for by Purism.
Plasma Mobile is (as far as I know) only volunteer work.
@amosbatto had a great write-up on why Phosh is likely to succeed as a mobile DE from a while back: The strategic advantages of Phosh for mobile Linux
If you think GNU/Linux is about Freedom then KDE Plasma takes this Freedom to next level via means of allowed customization. I would rate KDE Plasma as the most customizable desktop environment that I have ever used in my 15+ use of GNU/Linux. I would rate amongst top if I were to rank them
what they have in common though is that they are free-software …
Which is the most important quality for software to have
And that they’re Linux.
Edit: Or maybe I should say that KDE and GNOME are two different desktop environments used with Linux. And KDE Plasma is a version of KDE?
Also used on the BSDs and even windoze and other OSes!
Plasma is more like the shell, while KDE is the entire project + suite of applications.