KDE Plasma Mobile 21.07

https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/07/20/plasma-mobile-gear-21-07/

by jlpcsl • 5 years ago

120 110 5 years ago

Darmody3• 5 years ago

Oh God, they should stop using stupid names like KClock.

Yeah, putting "K" in front of every app/product of yours is dumb, unlike that company who puts "i" in front of everything, that's genius. /s

scrollaway• 5 years ago

I'm a KDE long time user and contributor, and i agree with the GP's comment.

Apple does it more sparingly (now), and fairly consistently: as a product line evolved. The iMac line did it when it was "cool", the iPod was the next one, and the iPhone evolved from the iPod so it made a lot of sense (and thus so did iOS). There's not really anything else Apple names this way. Apple TV, Macbook, Airpods, Safari... Whereas with KDE everything has got to have a K, it's pretty ridiculous. It's also not a particularly "pretty" letter and you end up with names that are either purposeful misspellings, midKapitalized, are plain bad puns, or occasionally and at best, are merely oKay.

KDE does not have a great brand. Apple does.

rimliu• 5 years ago

And which company is that? (I know you mean Apple, but Apple has iPhone and iPad, and that's it.)

Longhanks• 5 years ago

That company has stopped doing that >5 years ago. Since then, launched products are simply called Apple Watch, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pencil, AirPods, AirTags...

Also, the original comment did not say anything about Apple. Stop trolling.

teekert2• 5 years ago

Klock would be better indeed!

jorvi• 5 years ago

Apple doesn't call their apps iCalculator, iCamera, iContacts, iSettings, etc

dennis_moore• 5 years ago

For someone who doesn't use KDE on my main distro it's great. It's a giveaway that I probably shouldn't apt-get that program. (Not that I have anything against KDE software, just the idea of installing it on non-KDE environments)

qudat• 5 years ago

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but being a copy cat does not make you innovative.

jeroenhd2• 5 years ago

Although the iSomething branding is equally stupid, I think you've also got a case of the Kiki-effect here[1]. The harsh k-sound is a lot less pleasing to use than the soft I-sound that prefixes Apple's products.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

szszrk4• 5 years ago

Why? And what do you propose?

Knames are mostly ok, a user knows right from package list if this app is meant for his environment, or rather not. Same with gApps. The name tells what the app does. Why would I be mad at this?

saturn_vk• 5 years ago

An "app drawer" is going to look extremely weird, with every entry starting with a "K"

Darmody3• 5 years ago

I don't propose anything. It's just that it looks crappy to me. It's like they didn't put any thought into it. Yeah, let's put K in front of everything. It's not visually appealing and sometimes it isn't even easily pronounceable.

They have some great pieces of software but marketing wise it looks like they don't want to go beyond their Kusers.

This is my opinion anyway.

magicalhippo• 5 years ago

I found it cheesy back in the day, but I've grown to like unique names compared to generic ones. Makes it so much easier to search for when you got an issue or similar.

simion3143• 5 years ago

Yeah, they should use "smart" names like GNOME , I am wondering how those users will google "how do I do X with Files/Browser/Player"

gizdan2• 5 years ago

You Google "how do I do X with gnome player", has worked for me every time.

zingplex• 5 years ago

Easy, just use the inscrutable internal name for the application

"how do I do X with Nautilus/Epiphany/Totem"

j1elo3• 5 years ago

It does look crappy, IMHO. It feels like a 2000's trend that was cute (pun intended) but nowadays it's been 20 years and now looks out of date.

Probably it's just me, though: at that time I was working at a company with a name starting by V. The product name itself also started by V. We used the C++ Qt framework, where every class starts with Q. So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter.

simion3143• 5 years ago

So the lead devs picked up the trend and all our classes' names also started with V. Basically everything was named as something following the same letter.

That can be usefull, you know by looking at a class name , if it starts with Q is a native Qt stuff, and if it starts with V is your own custom stuff. As an example if you would see a VDropDown you will know that some of the developer in the company was asked to "improve" the native dropdown , you should check if there are bugs there.

e3bc54b2• 5 years ago

Like how Apple continued the NS* trend for decades?

vvillena• 5 years ago

Kclock is a fantastic internal name for that little application.

In the associated articles you can see the user-facing name for kclock is "Clock": https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat...

christophilus• 5 years ago

Anyone using this as a daily driver? What’s the experience like?

(I’m hoping to move to a Linux phone when my old iPhone finally bites the dust.)

mech422• 5 years ago

Have you looked at Enlightenment(1)? I believe it used to power Tizen back in the day...

1: https://www.enlightenment.org/

jcun41289• 5 years ago

I have a Pinephone, briefly tried KDE as I bought the KDE edition. It is a pretty design but what made me change from it is not detecting external display. Also I was not a fan of the "package manager" it was using. Arguable that's the OS (might have been Manjaro).

I ended up going with Mobian and Phosh. I even installed ARM VS code on it but it was so slow like 5 second lag per click.

Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card. I don't know why, it worked before. The battery also dies too fast even in airplane mode sitting on my desk. And then of course the lack of apps and the Phosh UI is not that great imo, I don't know why they went with the design of the vertical split when finding apps. Maybe they can't match the gestures and what not that Android/iOS has.

Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time.

As far as your actual question there are a couple of people on Reddit that are using it as a daily driver. [1] this is a little old though.

As for why VS Code my fantasy is the Samsung Dex idea however I'm not going to drop $2K on a flagship cellphone. The Pinephone is not that strong but I was looking to get a Qemu VM running on it that would neat.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/kxgtlu/pine...

TheFreim• 5 years ago

I don't have cell service and just basically use my phone as a glorified text editor (reminders, emails, low end browsing), would appear the pine phone would be perfect for me. I miss the ipod touch days, they did everything I needed.

kop3169• 5 years ago

Anyway problem right now is the modem doesn't detect my TMobile micro sim card.

Hm...that is odd, assuming you are still on Mobian/Phosh. Assuming you tried standard debugging, this page gives you some avenues for help: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php

The matrix channel for Mobian is very active, and there are plenty of folks there who can help debug that.

gary17the3• 5 years ago

Still it's neat, motivation to learn C++/GTK when I have the time.

You might want to have a look at libhandy[1] for GTK/GNOME, to "build GNOME applications scaling from desktop workstations to mobile phones".

[1] https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libhandy/

swiley• 5 years ago

I'm not using plasma but I've found I'm happiest with the WM I use on my other computers and scaling turned off. My Pinephone is pretty much a laptop that gets phone calls and stuff generally "just works."

kop3169• 5 years ago

I use it off and on, hoping to move to a daily driver soon. The main reason I do not use it full time yet is because MMS support is not fully integrated yet.

(My experience is on Mobian/Phosh with a Pinephone, YMMV)

As a basic phone (Calls/SMS/etc), it works pretty well. Voicemail works, but depending on your carrier, you may not get a notification for it. There is a Visual Voicemail client in the works, but that still has a bit to go before it could be considered for daily usage.

The camera HW isn't very good, so if you want to take really nice pictures, you would need to have something else to take them. Email/Telegram works well. Signal requires a third party client (which I haven't really tried). There are a few games you can install, but most are basic (2048, Chess, etc.). Running Android specific apps is possible, but not very usable from my experience.

Web browsing can be slow (Firefox can take a while to load).

Convergence is really neat...but I don't really use it since I have a laptop. Mobian is nice in that any Debian package will happily install/run (but YMMV on how well it works on mobile).

chrismorgan2• 5 years ago

I recently acquired a PinePhone, and Manjaro + KDE Plasma was installed out of the box. It was awful, utterly unusable. I brought it to its knees without even trying to, not even from poking and prodding with internals, just from trying to use the thing; I got it to crash outright once, and twice got its graphics stack basically bricked until manual restart, in two different ways, all in less than half an hour.

I have found postmarketOS + Phosh, Arch Linux ARM (dreemurrs) + Phosh, and Ubuntu Touch (all via https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/) to each be considerably more not-simply-broken; they’re merely—ah—“minimal”, that’s what I’ll call it. I haven’t yet tried KDE Plasma under a different distribution, but will eventually, because fairness demands it.

I know they said this stuff wasn’t ready to be a daily driver for any but serious enthusiasts, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as I found it.

I’m still going to persist. I am discouraged, but not dissuaded.

29083011397778• 5 years ago

I actually use my Pinephone as a weekend phone. Matrix works, so I have messaging. Calls work, so I have a phone. Maps (not turn-by-turn) work, Firefox works, the camera is slow, but works.

Respectfully, your experience sounds like what I had between when I got my Pinephone and last month (or so). It has since improved for me quite dramatically.

monroeclinton• 5 years ago

I tried it on the PinePhone, it's almost completely unusable.

1. The keyboard just won't open ~50% of the time. I had to do all sorts of hacky things to get it to open

2. The web browser Angelfish is no where near fully featured. The one good thing is that it has a built in adblocker.

3. For about a month whenever I restarted the phone it would be completely black. I had to bring it into a dark room and plug it in for me to be able to barely see anything. Then I could raise the brightness. An update fixed this

4. A lot of the apps just don't open

5. All sorts of random bugs/missing features, in the music player, the file explorer, etc.

This isn't a bad thing. It is a work in progress and I hope that it will continue to improve. Ubuntu Touch has worked the best for me.

gary17the3• 5 years ago

The "Strategic advantages of Phosh for mobile Linux" article[1] mentions that Plasma Mobile roadmap "in September 2017 showed [Plasma Mobile] as having finished the prototyping phase, but not yet ready for feature phones and basic smartphones". It's 2021, four years later, and the Plasma Mobile roadmap[2] seems to be in pretty much the same place (or perhaps it's just an outdated page?). Does that mean that the Plasma Mobile effort is badly undermanned and will take about 10 years to achieve the >>Plasma Mobile 3.0 "Featured Smartphone"<< milestone?

[1] https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/advantages-of-ph... [2] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/roadmap/

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

Is there a good email client for KDE Mobile yet?

ognarb4• 5 years ago

I made a small proof of concept 2 months ago. For now it's only able to read mails and it will take some times until I'm able to refactor KMail mail composer to also work on mobile. There was a screenshot of that in https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/04/27/plasma-mobile-updat...

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

Thanks for your work on this! It's a critical piece of software to have on a mobile device these days, I hope this project gains traction!

AbuAssar• 5 years ago

Can we install it on a rooted android phone?

gary17the3• 5 years ago

Perhaps have a look at postmarketOS[1].

[1] https://postmarketos.org/

grishka2• 5 years ago

After all these years, it still looks like they need a good designer.

mikevm2• 5 years ago

I really want to like KDE, but something about Plasma still feels off to me. Is it the lifeless grey color? Is it the ugly font? or ugly icons? I can't tell exactly where the problem lies, but at least GNOME looks much more polished.

I wish it would reach the polish level of Windows or MacOS.

chaos_a• 5 years ago

It's a lot of small inconsistencies that add up. Like the wifi icon being the wrong size for the amount of spacing it has around it, and also the fact that it's unclear what it actually does without clicking on it.

The spacing in the settings menu in the final screenshot is horrible too, the text gap sizes just change for no reason and the design has two layers of headers that aren't visually distinct enough.

gizdan2• 5 years ago

Lot of small inconsistencies as another said. Look at this screenshot[0]. The padding on the contact name and avatar is completely off.

Also look at the dialer[1], long inputs there are not that likely, but it still sucks that the numbers are behind the scroll bar.

Don't get me wrong. Last time I used KDE was some 5-6 years ago. These small inconsistencies were a lot more common, and back then for me it meant it's unusuable. I've been following KDE development, from the screenshots I've seen, it has come a long way. There are nowhere near as many inconsistencies as there used to be back then.

[0] https://plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-update-ju...

[1] https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat...

skinkestek• 5 years ago

For what it is worth it is actually a matter of taste.

For me, the defaults of typical KDE desktops have been wonderful during KDE 3 and KDE 5 cycles.

Ubuntu was the only Gnome centric distro that I used that was at times better.

I can't but a finger on exactly what but dull and uninspired feels very close.

Edit: as for Mac I used it for 3 years and while I support devs who want it I never got it. At least back when I used it there seemed to be an informal rule that any popular app had to have a gear icon (some had two) thrown into the user interface by a drunk dev.

I'm actually serious here, this was my experience: I could never understand why some had the gear in the bottom left corner, others somewhere else.

Windows used to be more boring and polished but now have 2 or 3 different control panels. Ironically I like Windows more than before though.

Maybe because Windows is becoming less dull and I'm becoming more dull?

smallerfish• 5 years ago

I believe it's a lack of good / opinionated defaults. KDE is deeply customizable, and once you have spent some time tweaking it you can have a great looking desktop. However, most/all of the distros ship with a bland/conservative default, which is probably supposed to be generally appealing, but in reality is bland. They badly need a design lead who can overrule the status quo.

grishka2• 5 years ago

- The paddings are all seemingly arbitrary.

- The proportions are inconsistent.

- There are way too many icons; I generally dislike this Linux GUI convention that every button must have an icon on the left. These icons add no information, they just make the whole thing look more busy.

- Sometimes there are shadows, but sometimes there aren't. You have to pick one or the other. And if you pick the other, you'd want borders because there needs to be a visual hierarchy either way.

- Sharp corners and small shadows don't work well together.

I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I've seen way too many people make these same mistakes when designing UIs.

Gnome does look more polished, and it's maybe nice to use with a touchscreen, but they're being weird by optimizing everything for touchscreens yet positioning it as a laptop/desktop DE.

ognarb4• 5 years ago

Help welcome: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/contributing/ :)

asaddhamani3• 5 years ago

The first thing I’d want to see is screenshots, but I had to scroll halfway through the article to see any. And why does a mobile UI have tiny minimise, maximise, and close icons?

ognarb4• 5 years ago

We usually have more screenshots in our blog posts. See https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/06/10/plasma-mobile-updat... and https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/04/27/plasma-mobile-updat....

solarkraft3• 5 years ago

This looks like you’re on a great course. There’s still a lot of work to do on the apps, but the shell is visually taking great shape! What was once a massive eye sore now looks pretty damn nice (especially the nav buttons, finally) and ready!

This is a nice course. Please keep moving in that direction. Hopefully this also signifies a move to greater care for UI in general, i.e. more considerations regarding UX and fixing UI glitches.

Exciting stuff. With KwinFT now using wlroots and this course continuing, Plasma could be a really great DE in a few years.

asaddhamani3• 5 years ago

This looks much better. If I may suggest some improvements:

* The UI could be more consistent, some windows (Elisa, AudioTube) have blurred backgrounds, but most don't

* The icons look dated because of the 3D shapes

I think as it is, this targets an extremely niche audience who might not care for these things. I know this would be much more persuasive for me with a slick UI, being able to run desktop class apps on a mobile sized device would be awesome.

kop3169• 5 years ago

And why does a mobile UI have tiny minimise, maximise, and close icons?

If I were to guess, they took the screenshots on a laptop/desktop.

est31• 5 years ago

Yeah the screenshots also have a slight shadow around the window. This reminds me of the KDE Spectacle feature to enable showing window decorations when screenshotting a specific window only. In those cases, at least the shadow is drawn artificially, maybe even the decorations. In fact it's possible that originally these windows didn't even have those decorations, they only got added later by the screenshot tool.

solarkraft3• 5 years ago

My main point of criticism of KDE, that their UIs look like they’re made by someone half asleep and looking somewhere else, is slowly, but steadily fading away. Big props for that! There’s still a long way to go, but I can absolutely see the effort succeeding. You rock, VDG (assuming they’re behind it)!

I also like that the podcasts app is responsive (in the web sense). I was originally excited about Linux on phones because I want to use the same software on my devices whether large or small. If I used this app on my phone, I‘d want to use it on the desktop as well. I strongly believe this is where software is going (only 10 years after the web) and highly welcome it.

Interestingly, Linux is extremely competitive with the other ecosystems in this regard due to Apple’s cautious approach and Microsoft appearing to be asleep at the wheel again.

The Linux phone may be here earlier than many of us think.

Abishek_Muthian3• 5 years ago

UI per se is not my issue with KDE, But the stability of their builtin softwares and that their focus seems to be adding new features than fixing what's already there.

e.g. There are several threads on Memory, CPU hogging issues with dolphin(even when not indexing). Plasma shell related issues like icons go missing etc.

Obviously inspite of that, KDE is still a great option for those looking for a stable and fully featured Linux desktop environment.

solarkraft3• 5 years ago

That’s my other issue. It’s so full of glitches … I hope this newfound interest in UI design will also have an effect on the sensitivity for bugs.

Stability/resource usage wise I didn’t have many issues in the Wayland session at all, though. Seems like they’ve improved that a lot in the past years.

I don’t use KDE for multiple reasons anymore, but I like how it usually understands what an advanced user wants to do, which no other DE really seems to. I massively appreciate that and have some hope they’ll get their act together in those areas eventually.

pjmlp• 5 years ago

So the dialer is catching up with what any Nokia Series 30 was capable of doing 20 years ago?!?

KDE Plasma Mobile 21.07

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