So, there is not much information on the website yet, but this is basically a full stack for mobiles, based on Wayland and Kwin for the UI and Ofono for the phone part.
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.
Right, here's the stack as a quick recap: Kubuntu with systemd + Android GPU driver via libhybris + kwin as Wayland display server and compositor (with a hwcomposer backend for the renderer) + plasmashell + phone shell package. Ofono for GSM. Regular Linux desktop bits for everything else.
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.
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. :)
So much negativity in this thread. Where's your hacker spirit? It might not yet be as feature-rich or polished as Android or iOS, but this is a very hacker-friendly project!
I for one am really excited about this. I wrote about why on reddit[1].
There's no need to wait: the n900 was real Linux (with X, apt-get and anything you could want) as was the n9. If Nokia hadn't scrapped the n9 virtually as soon as it was finished it would be a serious competitor 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.
I don't think people need Linux, but solid web applications support. Web will always win, yet now web apps on phones still suck. We try to wrap them into hybrid, but I think centralised distribution model is temporary solution.
I think we need a way to easily switch between fullscreen tabs, navigation between tabs and solid hardware acceleration for web stack.
I'm not sure you can guarantee a great user experience on a free, open web with user privacy and choice on a device you don't have rights to because it's completely locked down beyond your control by the vendor.
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.
Exciting stuff. I think it's important there is a solid open-source stack on mobile, even if most people won't leave iOS or Android behind. Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development? It would be good to avoid duplicate work.
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.
> Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development?
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.
Awesome project. I pitty the negativity here because I always think it's good to hack around with new ideas and techologies, as it will catch many bugs and give possibilities to fix them. Speaking of Wayland, is it stable enough yet? I heard Gnome now fully supports it, which is neat. I wish XMonad would be ported to wayland though.
I also think it is an interesting project, even if it doesn’t find any adoption. It’s good for finding bugs in the software stack they use, and this projects existence means users have one more option. I'm curious (and a little bit excited to see) where it will bring us.
what was really awesome was discovering how pretty much all the work we did on kwin_wayland brought wayland on desktop closer. The mobile-specific bits of code are _tiny_.
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.
For something that is in the early phases this looks amazingly functional and performant on a Nexus 5 (Android itself had a bit more latency when I had the phone).
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.
Free OS on your phone is great and all, but it's got that quirky linux UI problem where usability is an after thought to "me too" features.
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?
FWIW, this is very early and not representative of where we want the UI to be. A lot of our effort so far has gone into e.g. getting our Wayland story sorted out (we knew we wanted to be Wayland from day 1 on the phone, and do it properly to where every line of code we write also gets Plasma Desktop closer to being on Wayland) and getting all our service infrastructure ducks in a row on a phone device. Our community designers have in the meantime poured a lot of effort into generating user personas, design guidelines and mockups, but we're only just beginning to reallocate developer resources to realization.
This is open source -- you get to see how the sausage is made.
I'd actually disagree - this is a problem that KDE has in general. KDE has a focus on features and customisation but chronically lacks in the UI/UX department, whereas GNOME has a focus on UI/UX but is obsessed with one-size-fits-all and is actually going backwards with options, and ends up somewhat braindead as a result if you don't like exactly what the GNOME team likes.
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.
> I'd actually disagree - this is a problem that KDE has in general.
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 ...
I, and many of my linux converts, feel GNOME has not gotten to the point of creating a useable UI for a non-touch device yet. I've converted many many Snow Leopard users to Linux/KDE becuase it's the most visually-familiar and smooth experience for the Mac crowd that needs to get actual work done on a Linux desktop.
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.
Fair enough. I know my post was quite negative, but the first thing people see is that first page. It's definitely worth making that initial image look like something you can and would want to use. Text so small as to be unreadable, on a huge screen, was just a big red flag for me.
You must have some very low standards for "looking great". Like they say, this is a prototype and it shows. The design is all over the place. The one thing that sticks out the most is that there is no sense of scale at all. Everything is either ridiculously huge or tiny.
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.
Ah, the good old "submit a patch if you don't like it". This is a common problem all throughout the user interface shown, not an isolated issue. And as mentioned, it's a _prototype_: I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is far, far from the final user interface anyway.
In the end, it is a community effort. It needs people from the community to contribute. If you think you can do something better, I really encourage you to do so.
UI design - how would someone with strong views (and experience!) on gestures and UI features but with little coding experience get involved? Just put some mocks somewhere and post them to where the UI team meet?
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.
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.
Thanks for pointing out that page. I'd not found much but then I was searching for 'user interface testing' &c.
"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?
Pretty interesting project. And it looks great. I understand that it's work in progress, but it really need to support more devices, even in this phase.
Looking forward to seeing how this will work out! A replacement for Android is much appreciated.
This isn't a pitch to average joes, its for developers, particularly those engaged in the Linux ecosystem.
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".
I think the main problem is that the open source model of software development doesn't really work when it comes to visual or interaction design. We've all heard that phrase 'design by commitee' but that's what you get when everyone wants a say in the way the UI works.
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.
I was talking in general about Open Source and design not about Plasma. But since you ask, here are some small things I noticed in the video
- 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.
Removing features will be met with criticism, but a lot of KDE software is still using UIs made in 2007. A much more modern approach would be minimalistic defaults with a lot of under the hood configurability (which Qt and KDE are really good at - you can add panels, frames, etc to tons of apps seamlessly and put buttons everywhere if you want) which includes settings, where you have the default settings panels be the known most popular / important options (default download location, font size, etc) and you have an advanced toggle to get the traditional KDE overkill settings panel.
What defines UI / UX design? I am not a KDE user (currently). Well I use it once in a while, but compared to Windows, Mac OS (old and new), Android and iOS, which I all have used the only two things I've seen working well, as in being easy to understand and still efficient to use are KDE and XFCE. Oh and Squeak/Pharo.
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.
>Both Android and iOS are horrible when it comes to easy of use and know what you are doing in my opinion.
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.
I've seen toddlers use standard WIMP desktops, as well (I used to be one). It's not like they will be familiar with much else at that age, anyway. They'll learn whatever they have access to.
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.
I do wonder if you were using stock Android. I haven't enjoyed using any manufacturer's Android customisations, but I have found the stock Android experience to be far far better.
An example would be multiple gestures for the same widget, which can be confusing, like a checkbox, switch or slider, etc. that brings you into a sub menu when you long-press it. That's what you see in Android's configuration. You look for a setting, but then you have to google for it only to find out how to get to the menu that offers your option.
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 have to agree. I think Plasma 5 delivers the best UI/UX available on Linux today, and in many ways exceeds what the Windows and OSX worlds have to offer. This was quite surprising since I wasn't a big fan of the KDE 4 user experience.
I've heard several years ago that their UI philosophy is to target advanced users. No problem with that specifically (although one could argue that you can target casual and advanced users at the same time without much compromises).
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.
I think you're in this discussion just trying to spread misery which I don't understand at all. KDE is definitely targeting all users, and their user experience philosophy is "Simple by Default, Powerful When Needed".
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".
Users don't want to design their user interface, it's not their job. This approach is like - here are some musical notes, compose the song that is perfect for you!
I've been actually thinking about creating a new desktop environment (or a whole desktop platform ala Android if I had more time). Because there's a lot of space for improvement and innovation on (not only) Linux desktop. But this is not the case for mobile IMHO.
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.
> Hard to say, it's an instinctive feeling, but let's say that it's a culture of bloat.
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.
Troll is someone who deliberately tries to upset people, provoke a response, without really caring about the topic. You really think that's the motivation behind my comments?
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.
I designed and developed an app from scratch that users loved (4.9 avg rating, over 10k ratings) and that won a UX award. Not linking it to stay pseudonymous.
It looks very "Linux" from however long ago - that is, poor and inconsistent spacing, hodge-podge of icons (especially overcomplicated ones), frugal padding, etc. It's a common look for open source stuff. Doesn't really have and stick with a design language.
For some people, that will seem really jarring and uncomfortable.
Go try modern Plasma (5.3, 5.4 in a few months) and only use the shell and its widgets.
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.
Agreed. I used KDE for years, but I just couldn't stand the hideous interface anymore. GNOME 3 looks good and finally has all the functionality I need from a DE.
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 big problem is device support and how vendors approach that. They just throw crappy Linux BSPs over the wall for GPL compliance. For any community project to approach Android levels of device support is impossible because it takes a multi-million dollar effort to rewrite all that stuff and merge it into Linux mainline.
You're right! Here we see a case of colliding layouts, colliding image primary colours in those layouts, colliding header image orientations and placement, colliding header hero placements and colliding header hero font colours.
The footers and list styles seem to have had a minor fender bender too.
What does "to succeed" mean?
As long as it will be usable for me and some other people, not abandoned and keep progressing, it will succeed. It doesn't need to take over the market.
Yeah... new mobile platform is a really hard thing to do - and without a designer (whom they clearly don't have), it's impossible. Nobody will use this.
Why are you so negative? Why do you say they don't have a designer? Did you ask? This is a technology preview, and for a new development platform, it's quite nice already.
As a technology preview, it sucks. Not many technical details at all.
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 is not a marketing video. It mostly shows how Qt apps work with little or no modification, and that it is possible to use existing software with minimal adaptation. I think it is interesting because if a few people can make a usable prototype with some effort, there is hope that some more people and effort can actually produce a reasonably nice open-source mobile system to build on; that a phone running on open-source software is not an impossible or far-fetched idea.
Windows Phone has a talented team of designers, an innovative and easy to use UI, and backing from a major corporation with practically unlimited funds. It also has a tiny sliver of market share. Jolla has great designers, compatibility with Android apps, and killer hardware. Their marketshare is even smaller. Realistically, right now Android and iOS have all the mindshare and there is not a chance in hell that a me-too mobile OS is going to get any meaningful traction.
It will run apps from every major mobile OS except iOS, and it will be completely free. It will be able to do "convergence" desktops before even Ubuntu Touch because its running an identical software stack to Kubuntu, you just need to switch the running shell.
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.
I think they are smarter than what you think , They know this is not for everybody , and this is not going to replace android/iOS ever. They targeting people like me who are sick of android/iOS because of closeness of platform.Even canonical with its huge budget admits they don't have plan to replace iOS/android (which as you told is too late for such product , even for Microsoft which have shitload of money ) but they targeting specific user's.
p.s. This is my understanding as simple end-user.I might be wrong.
There is no money in android ? That is one of the funniest thing I ever heard in my entire life ! Just calculate how much android brought people to the internet , Then multiple it by some rate , it will be the money google make from advertising on android platform . How much internet going to grow , Google income will be grow also.
Every search , Every app which you download from google play , It is direct money which goes into google's pocket,
Put aside Google play income which it will get from every transaction _ 30% I think , I am not sure _ (which is huge but let assume google spend all of it on android ecosystem and maintaining).
You clearly misunderstood the article.As I mentioned eariler Yes , there is no profit in selling Android products _hardware:some , software:none_( which indeed article talks about that) , but that is not Google's strategy at all.Please search and read about Google's making money strategy.
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.
I see where you're coming from but being able to leverage open-source software written in (at least) Qt as well as existing and upcoming Linux security features should alleviate some of those concerns. An Apple app store approach surely isn't the only way to distribute apps and "create a community".
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.
Kubuntu already uses MAC, and since this is using Muon they can plug whatever app store they want in, including kde-apps. If they wanted to, they could mandate the inclusion of AppArmor permissions files with apps, and then present the requested permissions to users at install, or even more easily do what Android M does and prompt the first time an access permission is invoked.
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.
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.