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Experience with Plasma Mobile, part 2.

I was able to clone the official master repository and commit my hacks to it, but when I sent the pull request, the current active maintainer said that the master branch was actually severely out of date and to try the "halium-flash" branch.

So I did. I checked out the "halium-flash" branch and attempted to install Plasma Mobile. The bash file used to flash the phone still needed to be hacked around, though my previous commit was made irrelevant by the change. However, I did get it working on my phone.

So, here are my thoughts: It's most definitely not ready. The lock screen looks pretty and is well put together, and the "desktop" and icons for applications look very nice.

However, my phone does not have a physical "home" button, and Plasma Mobile to date does not have a digital "home" button. So, in order to close an application I have to literally reboot my phone.

As of yet there seems to not be any tactile feedback or visual feedback, which is odd when typing in the passcode to log into Plasma Mobile or trying to open an application.

Firefox crashes if you try to open it, and currently there are two choices of wallpaper. I haven't tried calling someone, but I'm fairly certain that Plasma Mobile does not support telephony on my phone type.

So, my verdict is still the same: I have great hopes for the Plasma Mobile project, but unless you are a developer who is interested in making it a better product, I would stay away for now.

Comments
  • 1
    Plasma is KDE right? A desktop environment? What does it run on when it's used on a smartphone? As in what's the underlying OS?
  • 0
    @Froot
    I think it's running KDE Neon under the hood, which is Ubuntu based. The concept actually moves well to the smartphone, it's just the lack of necessary features like a back or home button make it literally unusable.
  • 1
    @RiderExMachina Okay. But if it's Ubuntu and not android then how is the app scene? Is there any apps at all? What's the point if there isn't any?
  • 0
    @Froot
    According to the website Ubuntu Phone apps work. However, I wasn't able to figure out which app was the app store due to the frustration of *open app* *be unable to close app* *reboot phone*.

    At this point it's very much alpha, so as I said in my OP, the only reason to try it would be to see how far in development they are and then help them out, whether with bug reports or actual code.

    It's a cool project, but at this point it's completely unusable.
  • 1
    @RiderExMachina Cool. I doubt the app scene will ever catch up to Android or iOS but it seems like a cool thing to play around with from time to time
  • 1
    @Froot
    That's my sentiment about it as well. Something cool to hack on in free time, but nothing worth using as an actual phone system.

    Hopefully someday it'll become more mainstream, but I doubt it.
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