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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

#111

Post by st3v3r »

k__ wrote: post #12
SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you choose Replicant over CopperheadOS? I've been looking at different ROMs like these and Replicant seems to only maintain pretty old devices which steered me away, plus the fact that it's still on KitKat.

This seems to be the main problem with android alternatives. I have a Huawei Honor, but can't find any Android alternatives for it.

In order to get the android alternative on there, someone has to do the work to get it on there in the first place. If no one has done it for your device, then that job falls to you. Which is why most of these target Nexus devices, because those are the easiest to do the work for (or it's already done).

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

#112

Post by reledi »

hackuser wrote: post #55

If I understand correctly, this is a user environment. What OS does it run on? A Linux distro? Android? I don't see that detail mentioned on the site. Perhaps people familiar with KDE and Plasma know, but I don't. Or perhaps I'm overlooking something obvious ... EDIT: Wikipedia says that Plasma is a desktop environment, not an OS, and that "Plasma Mobile is a Plasma variant for smartphones". https://en.wikipedia.org/…

The content on the page does a very poor job of explaining what it is and why we should care. It's only until I saw the KDE developers at the bottom that I realised it's a graphical desktop environment but for your mobile phone. It's FOSS so it's hackable, as in you have access to the source code and development is done in the open and contributions are encouraged. The target developer phone seems to be the LG Nexus 5. I guess it's running some Debian-based OS as apt-get is its package manager.

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

#113

Post by owaislone »

andmarios wrote: post #59
owaislone wrote: post #19

Just like desktop KDE, the UI doesn't appeal to me. I find it too flashy and kind of "in your face". My favorite mobile OS so far has been Meego that ran on N9. That device was mind blowing and that OS. Amazing. It had such a simple, yet useful UI. Multi-tasking was better than what even Android has now. I hope Jolla doesn't die like that and we see a lot more devices come out running Sailfish.

To be fair though, Nokia (and its Meego department) had close relationships with the KDE developer community due to Qt and if I recall correctly, even chose some libraries from KDE applications (like KOffice/Calligra) to use in their mobile apps.

QT and other KDE tech is pretty solid. No complains there. It's just that I can't bring myself to use their software because of the UI/UX. All they do is make things blue, transparent and big. I don't know what their fixation with desktop widgets is. No one uses that after a point. They get old real fast. A good shell should be invisible. It should let apps take the center stage but still keep everything readily available. I find KDE to be overly complex without making things easier. A lot of people will probably not like it but I find Unity to be an amazing desktop shell. It's completely gets out of your way and still gives you so much power. My only issue with Unity7 is that it sometimes gets a bit slow on relatively older hardware.

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

#114

Post by seba_dos1 »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #28
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.

Openmoko used GTK+ in their first two distro iterations, then Qtopia on X11 with E17-based WM, and then went fully EFL.

And since 2008, when I got my Neo Freerunner, I didn't have many issues with phone functionality unless I broke it myself (which I kept doing, as I loved to tinker with that phone) - and I've been using Freerunner for years until I replaced it with N900. The worst issue I experienced that wasn't my fault was that in GTK-based Om2007.2 messaging app slowed down awfully once it got thousands of SMS in its history, with evolution-server hogging the CPU for many seconds on most actions. Didn't happen on next OS iterations.

There was also buzz issue on early devices, but that was easily fixable.

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

#115

Post by girvo »

lphnull wrote: post #37
benmcnelly wrote: post #30

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…

I used to have that. It was my Nokia n900. I was able to pull up live thumbnail previews of all apps running in the background, and this included live simultaneous previews of: youtube videos in a web browser, games, and Debian, without lag. Try doing that on today's technology. It had a wonderfully acurate resistive touch screen that was pressure senstive that was really good for drawing and coloring! The camera wou…

I adored my Nokia N9 for similar reasons! The single best phone I've ever owned.

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

#116

Post by seba_dos1 »

anoother wrote: post #23
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.

I preordered my Neo Freerunner and it was able to make phone calls since day zero.

Of course, Neo1973 was a different story, as it pretty much wasn't supposed to be fully working on day zero ;)

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

#117

Post by erikb »

Okay, let's summarize: There is a need, but this may not be its satisfaction. A pity that it made it to front page entry 1 already before really working on user needs.

E.g. if you make a video, don't make it 6 minutes long, don't use such kind of annoying background music, don't advertise that you can call someone. It's like advertising a computer by showing that it can connect with a USB mouse. Show us the dev environment for apps, and how far your API can look into the system. Show us the operating system and its features, e.g. by showing that someone manipulates the list of processes in screenlock widgets or something. Show us the people who do cool stuff with it that they couldn't do in a walled garden environment.

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

#118

Post by dom0 »

lytedev wrote: post #26

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 ey…

They'd have to try really hard to have a worse UX than Android. (Semi-)Seriously.

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

#119

Post by Trufa »

owaislone wrote: post #19

Just like desktop KDE, the UI doesn't appeal to me. I find it too flashy and kind of "in your face". My favorite mobile OS so far has been Meego that ran on N9. That device was mind blowing and that OS. Amazing. It had such a simple, yet useful UI. Multi-tasking was better than what even Android has now. I hope Jolla doesn't die like that and we see a lot more devices come out running Sailfish.

I know this is a completely subjective matter but I'm really surprised you'd use the word flashy and in your face as a description, I really like it, but boring and dull could fit better as a criticism IMO, specially with older versions, I'm really curious about your choice of words, this is what it looks like to me:

http://i.imgur.com/J82pZMh.png

You'd say that is flashy? Just curious :)

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

#120

Post by dom0 »

ricogallo wrote: post #103
Etheryte wrote: post #41

What is it with using scroll hijacking on flashy product pages? If I can't use the page normally, I won't use it.

This. I hate to readjust my usual scrolling habit just because they think their unique scrolling friction is better.

FF ESR - scrolls normally for me.
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