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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

#171

Post by shmerl »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #158
shmerl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neither of those are pleasant, but neither is as bad as T-Mobile They aren't any better, if not worse, because in contrast to T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon are asking for money from other services if they want be exempt from caps. In my view they are all bad when Net Neutrality is concerned. It can be fixed only with better law which ban zero rating, and as well bans caps as a method of fleecing users.

Data caps/tiers/metering is basically the only fair way to provide data service. "Unlimited" is inherently flawed as a product concept.

> Data caps/tiers/metering is basically the only fair way to provide data service. "Unlimited" is inherently flawed as a product concept.

It was proven time and again that data caps are driven by greed, not by necessity. That's clear in wireline networks where congestion isn't a problem at all, and can be as well demonstrated in mobile ones, where spectrum limit can be an issue. Caps don't prevent network congestion in mobile networks. I.e. don't pretend it's a network management tool, it's not. It's just money gouging tool. So it has nothing to do with fairness.

ISPs already have tiers for bandwidth. There is no need to use caps as well.

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

#172

Post by winter_blue »

reledi wrote: post #112
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…

Yea, the Plasma Mobile home page doesn't really make a strong pitch towards a potential user.

For mobile developers, the biggest difference is that they'd be using the Qt framework instead of the Android framework.

So the pitch at least for mobile developers, should be why it's a more pleasant and better (and more productive) experience to develop mobile apps with Qt vs the Android frameworks.

I'm not how much better Qt is going to be since I haven't used it. But I've been a long-time desktop Linux KDE user, and one of the biggest gripes I have with KDE is that its quite unstable and buggy compared to Mac and Windows.

KDE 4 became almost very-stable with 4.13+, but the early version of KDE 4 were horribly unstable. With Plasma 5, from what I hear, things got worse again.

This is the biggest problem, I think. To the people who have actually used KDE on deskotp Linux for a long time, how many of you have enough confidence in the stability and reliability of a mobile Qt/KDE environment to use it everyday?

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

#173

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

This looks interesting. Flashing it on my old Nexus 5 to try it out.

Hopefully I don't send up swallowing these words, but I've gotta say that they appear to have made it extremely easy to install this. Running two fastboot commands, cloning a repo, and running a shell script is pretty easy, and making it easy goes a long way towards making it approachable.

EDIT: Install script is broken on macOS. I fixed it and got it flashed. It's dreadfully slow. :( I'd consider stability and performance my top two priorities. I already largely hate mobile devices, so the poor performance is really frustrating. I still need to play around with it to see what the other capabilities are like.

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

#174

Post by lphnull »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #104
lphnull wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>nothing will ever be good enough for them again. Reading this made me so sad. This is exactly how I feel. Nothing will ever be good enough again. :(

I would kill for a Nokia N950. A proper keyboard, and a true Linux operating system with the usual userspace software you would expect.

My raspberry pi 3, encased in a rainbow colored 3d printed case and with a 3.5" touch screen, is what took the place of my n900. It's a fraction of the cost of an n900, but with a standard rpi linux distribution and modern specs. Sure I can't make calls with my pi, but the sacrifice is well worth it for the nerd appeal of having a fully functional computer in your pcoket.

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

#175

Post by lphnull »

4goodapp wrote: post #164
lphnull wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, at least it work well with HN. http://i.imgur.com/wg9r4DM.png :)

you're giving me nostalgia. I always dreamed that my n900 was going to be my futuristic bitcoin phone. I suspect that people started abandoning the n900 right around the time that our dreams were crushed in the great bitcoin crash of not so long ago.

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

#176

Post by benmcnelly »

benmcnelly wrote: post #17
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.

I think I will remix it with the Google Pixel ad music and style and see if it helps. like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBM5W12JYmQ

I started making it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxqXUxt9ah8

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

#177

Post by lphnull »

pre wrote: post #154
amyjess wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, my USB port died too. I ended up getting an external charger and a handful of spare batteries. Did that for about a year or two before I got my Nexus 5. At least buying new batteries gave me back my battery life that had degraded to almost nothing over the years. On top of that, over the years, the kickstand broke, the screen got scratched badly, my belt clip broke in multiple places, the SIM slot became really…

Yep, also using an external charger to keep mine going. My batteries are swelling. I suspect it's no longer safe really. :-?

I've already disposed of two or three spare batteries. I have two chargers and 3 batteries that I rotate in a cycle. It's always cheap to order them off amazon or ebay.

Universal battery chargers are a life saver if you have multiple types of batteries to charge.

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

#178

Post by cheiVia0 »

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…

You are not alone:

https://neo900.org/

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

#179

Post by nathcd »

On desktop my preferred environments are Xfce and i3, but I wonder why GNOME isn't pushing in this same direction as Plasma Mobile and Unity. (Unless they are and I'm not aware?) It seems like out of all the main DEs, GNOME3 is the nearest to being suited for mobile and touch screens, perhaps more so than Unity (IMO). A google search turns up a few initiatives/blog posts throughout the years that speak of bringing GNOME to mobile, but nothing seems to have come of any of them as far as I can tell.

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

#180

Post by ocdtrekkie »

shmerl wrote: post #171
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data caps/tiers/metering is basically the only fair way to provide data service. "Unlimited" is inherently flawed as a product concept.

> Data caps/tiers/metering is basically the only fair way to provide data service. "Unlimited" is inherently flawed as a product concept. It was proven time and again that data caps are driven by greed, not by necessity. That's clear in wireline networks where congestion isn't a problem at all, and can be as well demonstrated in mobile ones, where spectrum limit can be an issue. Caps don't prevent network congestion…

Nonsense. If you believe the whole "driven by greed" drivel, you have never looked at how a business operates in your life. It's no more or less greedy than raising prices for everyone (which would otherwise happen). The difference is, data caps are a tax on the top 1% of users, rather than a tax on everyone.
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