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Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

plasma-mobile.org

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Re: Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

#21

Post by darklajid »

I like this announcement and still root for any alternative phone platform. The thing is - which device would I buy?

Plasma Mobile supports the Nexus 5 and (maybe) the OnePlus One right now. CopperheadOS doesn't support either of those. I was unable to get a reliable source for supported devices for Ubuntu Phone (best I found was [1], not even sure if that's related) and so far I don't believe that the supported devices for THAT platform intersect with the other two.

Searching for sailfishOS device support only comes up with Jolla phones. It seems as if not only is the market lacking alternative systems, it's also near impossible to try out the ones that do exist. Buying a device for some experimental OS is something I have done (Flame for FxOs - still sad that it died, owned a Palm Pre), but cumbersome and expensive.

1: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices

Re: Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

#23

Post by anoother »

INTPnerd wrote: post #14

The intro video is very...interesting. They have this fast paced, upbeat music while they very slowly do things on the phone, like make phone calls. It felt like they thought we should be impressed it can make phone calls.

> they thought we should be impressed it can make phone calls.

Oh, but you should be impressed. For how long could OpenMoko not make phone calls?

Open-source phone OSs have a habit of neglecting actual phone functionality. So I think it's great that they highlight it.

Re: Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

#26

Post by lytedev »

Interface seems gratuitously large except the status bar and clock and whatnot. In all the shots of the home screen (?) the on-screen navigation buttons seem to cover the labels of the app icons... sometimes. The "Muon" app has a smaller icon so the label sits higher... looks not so great.

However, it seems they're trying to appeal to the more Libre folks - anti-all-current-smartphone-OS-vendors and their watchful eyes - who are generally developer types -- at least as far as I know. And those types of people are usually willing to give in the UX department.

I'd love to see this (and any alternative smartphone OS) project succeed, but it's got a fair amount of growing to do before that happens in my opinion.

I would love to someday have Linux running on my phone and just be able to do whatever the heck I want with it with simple APIs for interacting with sensors and cellular voice/sms/data just working. Like Arch Linux for your smartphone. That would be so fun to hack on I think.

Re: Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

#28

Post by honkhonkpants »

INTPnerd wrote: post #14

The intro video is very...interesting. They have this fast paced, upbeat music while they very slowly do things on the phone, like make phone calls. It felt like they thought we should be impressed it can make phone calls.

It's an improvement on Openmoko. I remember the first time some freetard tried to show me Openmoko at a trade show, and before he could successfully make a phone call he had to pop up an xterm, run alsamixer, and fix everything. It was hilarious.

I believe Openmoko used GTK+. Maybe Qt was what the project needed all along.

Re: Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

#29

Post by prplhaz4 »

deadcast wrote: post #2

Whoa very cool! Happy to see a new, free phone OS. I'm currently switching to Replicant and moving away from the Apple/Google controlled phone world.

I'm surprised LuneOS never comes up on these threads...it's slow moving, but the team has always been focused on quality and had steady monthly releases for 2yrs now...

https://github.com/webOS-ports

http://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Main_Page

Re: Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device

#30

Post by benmcnelly »

The power of things like this taking off is not what they are now, but what they can be. There are lots of real people with their own good reasons to not be tied to Google/Apple, and whats really impressive here is that unlike firefox OS, they are (in my opinion) doing this in a much better way.

As this catches on, it only helps improve linux hardware (ARM) support, telephony applications for linux, and the like. As well as being able to have (or make for others) a truly remarkable user interface and apps. This is a mobile computer, running linux, running a desktop environment (not webkit, or Java VM, or closed source code) that only limits what you can make by your skill and imagination.

Yes it looks pretty mediocre now, but that's because its waiting on you to get involved.

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