Plasma Mobile
From February 4 to 10, the team of KDE Plasma Mobile had its first sprint in Berlin. During this time, the team of, for me, the best graphical environment that exists showed their latest advances, they talked about what they are doing and what they have planned to do. In the header image we have a screenshot of what would be the Plasma Mobile home screen, which reminds us so much of some launchers of Android like what we see in the desktop version of Plasma. Among these we have the exactly the same icons of the WiFi, tasks and the volume.
Ilya Bizyaev improved the aesthetics of the user interface in Plasma Mobile, bringing it much closer to the models. On the other hand, Marco Martín rewrote and simplified the code, which resulted in a simpler and more stable UI. In this sense, we have that Plasma Mobile has improved in the same way as Plasma Desktop in the last months / years: it will look better at the same time that it will show fewer errors.
Plasma Mobile progresses properly
En the entrance posted on his blog they also tell us that Dimitris Kardarakos improved the documentation to make the development of development settings and application development easier for everyone. Thanks to him we now have the tutorial Kirigami. The instructions for creating QEMU and Virgil 3D from source code have been superseded by the installation in a simple snap package. But in a mobile the most important if not the most are the applications.
Angelfish web browser
Simon Schmeisser improved the Angelfish web browser which is now based more on Kirigami, displays favicons and provides search suggestions. Plasma Mobile intends for Angelfish to still have more to do with Kirigami. At the same time, Linus worked on Kaidan, an XMPP messaging client for Plasma Mobile and other platforms. Kaidan now has a download manager to download and store files instead of downloading them again every time he starts. Support for emojis has also been added, a suggestion that they could not miss already in 2019 where even complex messages are published only with emojis.
Camilo Higuita was working on the framework MauiKit and the Maui application suite for almost a year and some of these applications will be included in Plasma Mobile by default. His work consisted of keep apps up to date, adding missing functions and correcting errors that it was finding. Among these applications we have Index, Vvave, Owl and Note.
Discover is also on Plasma Mobile
Jonah Brüchert created a patch for Discover which fixes an issue that was causing the icons to not display correctly. At the same time, it also made all new applications available in the Debian repository. Aleix Pol, meanwhile, fixed an issue that caused Discover to suggest apps that didn't look good on mobile.
In addition to working in Software, the Plasma Mobile team also you are working on various hardware projects. Before the Berlin sprint, the KDE community attended FOSDEM, where they showed Plasma Mobile running on RISC-V hardware.
Plasma Mobile in RISC-V
During the sprint, the team met with Dorota Czaplejewicz from Purism, who is working on the project. By 5. Purism has provided the Librem 5 dev kits to Plasma Mobile developers and, with Dorota's help, the Plasma Mobile team has been able to bring their operating system with those dev kits.
Community feedbacks
In the sprint, the team worked closely with community members. The intention was to listen to users to consider all opinions, something that took place in an AMA session ("Ask Me Anything" or "ask me whatever" in Spanish).
Plasma Mobile ended up happy with his Berlin sprint experience and personally it gives me hope that one day I can actually use Linux on mobile devices. Although it is true that there is one thing that worries me: What about applications like WhatsApp? The company ensures that it will ban any user who uses third-party apps and they do not seem to be about to launch it for Linux. In any case, Plasma Mobile continues to advance slowly and with good lyrics.
Would you like to have a mobile with Plasma Mobile?